Rationalising Death
by Scientist's Thesis
Summary: What if the mentioned super intelligence of Yagami Light and his antagonists wasn't just informed, but was actually true?
1. Boredom

_TW: Attempted rape, premeditated murder_

_Author's Notes: The noted intelligences of Light, L, Mello and Near are mostly informed abilities. What if they weren't, though?_

* * *

_3:37PM. November 27, 2003. Tokyo, Japan._

Yagami Light, a high school student of 17, was sitting bored in class when the event that would culminate in a complete revolution of the world happened.

_This world is rotten_, he thought, as he stared out the window. He was propped on his elbows, holding his head and waiting for the sensei to finish her lecture. _Dirty, broken._ Light's mind was wandering, as usual. The sensei mostly didn't mind - he was the prodigy - but he couldn't help but be grim during these moments.

The way he saw it, the world was a pretty awful place. Corrupt politicians, cruel criminals, evil CEOs and even day-to-day evil acts made it that way, but everyday stupidity ensured it would stay like that. Nobody could make even a simple utility calculation. The only saving grace was that this was as true for the villains as for the heroes.

That train of thought never really left his mind. Not when he was studying, not when he was reading, eating, showering, training. He wished, and dreamt, and wished more. He wanted... a world of peace. A utopia, perhaps with him being the advisor of the overlord - not the overlord himself, of course, he didn't like political positions. Unless no one else was fit to step in. But he preferred being in the back, behind the curtains.

_What's that...?_ Suddenly there was a small, dark rectangle on the grass outside. _A notebook...?_ He could've sworn it hadn't been there a minute ago.

A while later, the class bell rang. He quickly packed and left the classroom. However, he hung back and waited to see if anyone would claim ownership of the mysterious black notebook. No one did. He picked it up.

On the cover, the words "Death Note" were written in a stylised font. Nothing else. He opened the notebook, and the first page was also black, with what looked like a set of instructions.

THIS IS A SHINIGAMI NOTEBOOK, the first sentence read.

_shinigami... a god of death?_ He kept reading.

THE HUMAN WHOSE NAME IS WRITTEN ON THIS NOTEBOOK SHALL DIE.

_This is sick. Why do people like this crap? This is worse than those chain letters..._ Still, he was curious. He put the notebook in his bag and headed home. The whole time, though, he was thinking about the notebook. _Who would write a notebook like that? Why?_

And one insidious, barely audible voice in his head said, _And what could we do with such power?_

* * *

_4:19PM._

He arrived home, removed his shoes and greeted his mother, who was in the kitchen. Then he quickly scrambled to his room, locking the door behind him as he did so. That wasn't usual for him, but this was an unusual situation. He calmly slid the notebook from his backpack and put it on his desk.

THIS NOTEBOOK WILL NOT TAKE EFFECT UNLESS THE WRITER HAS THE PERSON'S FACE IN THEIR MIND WHEN WRITING HIS/HER NAME. THEREFORE, PEOPLE SHARING THE SAME NAME WILL NOT BE AFFECTED.

IF THE CAUSE OF DEATH IS WRITTEN WITHIN 40 SECONDS OF WRITING THE PERSON'S NAME, IT WILL HAPPEN.

IF THE CAUSE OF DEATH IS NOT SPECIFIED, THE PERSON WILL SIMPLY DIE OF A HEART ATTACK.

AFTER WRITING THE CAUSE OF DEATH, DETAILS OF THE DEATH SHOULD BE WRITTEN IN THE NEXT 6 MINUTES AND 40 SECONDS.

_This is completely insane. Who would think of this?_

His bedroom was tidy and organised. The bed, always neatly made, was by the wall on the right with a bookshelf on each side. The desk that held the death note also supported a computer and a small TV screen. Light flopped himself onto the cushion.

_Death if you write the name... Insane... Inhuman..._

And before Light could suppress the thought: _And bears testing._

He quickly dismissed it as the random ramblings of his head. How was the notebook even supposed to work in the first place? Magic? That strained credulity beyond possibility. It was just some prank. On whom, though... was another matter. And what, exactly, would anyone accomplish with this?

_If I had made this notebook as a prank... what would've been my objective?_

The first answer that sprang to mind would be to prove that people are selfish and would murder anyone who inconvenienced them. But Light thought that was probably just his regular train of thought catching up with him. In fact, there was a surprise: since he picked up the notebook at school, he hadn't yet had a single thought of how humans were inefficient at being moral. Not directly, anyway. Interesting.

He spent ten minutes chewing on his lips until he gave up, sat on his desk chair and stared at the notebook. Tentatively, he opened it and flipped past the first page. All other pages were just regular notebook pages. He picked a pen and... waited. That would be murder, if it worked.

_Don't be silly_, his common sense said. _Such things don't exist. It couldn't possibly work. You'll just write someone's name, nothing will happen, and then tomorrow someone will come to you and ask for the notebook, and then they'll point at you and say you're a horrible person. "You actually wrote a name in this!"_

Another part of his mind was telling him to test it.

_Why am I even taking this seriously? This is insane._

_Well_, his practical (and curious) side said, _it obviously can't work, can it? It's just a prank. So you might as well. But you shouldn't write someone who's close to you there. Also, why would you want to kill a close person?_

_Yes, that's obvious_, his common sense replied. Light watched this internal struggle with some fascination and wondered why he was actually even considering it. _But in case you've forgotten, killing is bad. We'd have to find someone whose death wouldn't matter._

_No_, Practical answered. _We have to find someone whose death would result in a net positive change in society's expected utility._

_That doesn't make sense_, said a part of him that was grudgingly becoming convinced. _How would killing anyone result in that?_

_Oh, you've worked that out already_, Test It answered. _In fact, in the deep dark corners of your mind you have figured out many things that could make your utopia work. And amongst them is the simple fact that some people would make the world a better place if they were dead. Criminals, for instance. Murderers, serial killers, rapists. People who only make other people's lives miserable, who take and destroy other lives, people whose impact on the world will never be good._

No one had anything to say about that in his mind. So he just thought. And thought. And kept thinking. It was true. He routinely pictured scenarios with people he found in the news where they somehow died and the world became a better place. One by one. All of those people.

_Suppose I want to actually test this notebook_, Light thought, while remarking that he'd never felt so divided in his mind as right this moment. _Where do I fin-_

_The TV_, the practical side answered as soon as Light turned on the small monitor beside his computer. He had just been thinking about checking the news, hadn't he?

"The murderer who indiscriminately killed 6 people yesterday in Shinjuku's Hanka District is still locked up in the preschool with the teacher and 7 children as hostages."

_Bingo._

"The police suspects Otoharada Kurou, 42, unemployed. Last night, Otoharada was..."

_Do I think this piece of news will last for more than 6 minutes 40 seconds? No, obviously not... So... heart attack it is._

He felt... strange. Tingly, almost. Suddenly it didn't look so unthinkable, so impossible. Something in his mind was justifying it: the guy had already killed six people and had another eight caught as hostages, seven of whom are children. There is no way the world was better with this man alive. His pen reached for the paper. He fixed the picture of the man on the TV in his mind. He wrote the name. Immediately, he looked at his watch. He couldn't understand why, but he actually expected it to work.

...37, 38, 39, 40 seconds.

Light looked at the TV. The announcer was about to change subject. Light sighed, somewhat relieved and disappointed at the same time, and was about to turn it off, when...

"Oh! The hostages are coming out! Seems like everyone is fine! And now the police is storming the school! Have they made the arrest?"

_Im... possible..._ Light's eyes widened slowly, and he started sweating. That couldn't be true. He kept watching. The police got in, and some time passed. They finally got out... with no one. No suspect.

"According to the hostages, the suspect just collapsed. The..."

Light immediately turned the TV off, closed his notebook, put it in the first desk drawer and sat on his bed, agape and shocked. His whole body shivered and his face looked pale. Someone watching him from the outside would probably conclude he was severely ill. His vision was swimming and he almost didn't hear his mother calling from downstairs.

"Light-kun! It's time for dinner!"

"Coming, mother!" he replied mechanically. His mind was still trying to compute the implications and failing.

_Okay, let's try to calm down and rationally analyse this. Maybe it was just a coincidence..._

_Yes, sure, it could've been a coincidence. But you have to admit that the prior probability that a random 42-year-old man will have a heart attack at any given moment is pretty low. More than that, though, the hypothesis that there is a correlation between writing the man's name and his death is no longer negligible._

_I need to test it again._

And one tiny voice in the background said, _But that's murder._

Test It promptly replied: _It's not bad to kill someone who deserves to die._ The tiny voice didn't answer.

He thought he was rather calmer than he should be, and then he realised his hands were shaking so badly he couldn't actually reach the desk drawer and grab the notebook again. He closed his eyes, drew a deep breath, steadied himself, and opened them again, reaching for the drawer once more.

"Light!"

"Just a minute!" Damnit. Still, what were the odds?

_We can, in fact, estimate that..._

_Shut up, I wasn't serious._

* * *

_8:28AM. November 28, 2003._

For the first time since he started watching the news when he was little, Light wasn't thinking just passively about how to make the world a better place. How to teach people to be moral. He was, in fact, thinking about action. About what he could actually do.

The next day, his mind wandered. But that wasn't unusual. He was, however, paying much more attention to the world around himself.

_Do we really want to test it more? We already have what could be called pretty definitive evidence..._

_Verify_, that tingly part he called Test It replied as he walked into his classroom. It _could_ have been just a coincidence. He saw some boy being bullied, and his annoyance with the state of the world once again grew. But of course, the bullies weren't actually doing anything worthy of a death sentence - yet.

"The money is his," Light said with a bored monotone to the bullies. They looked at him, outraged at being called out, but then their faces went a little bit pale for a second before they turned on the acting again and mumbled something about "not needing the money anyway." When his back was to them, Light chuckled to himself. Being the smartest kid in the class with a reputation for being badass (pretty undeserved, to be honest, he hadn't actually ever done anything) plus being the son of a police officer could help...

His thoughts stopped on their tracks.

He was the son of a police officer. That was a very small detail that had escaped him, probably because most of the time it was just that: a small detail. A piece of background information. He kicked himself mentally as he sat down with his eternally bored look.

_Okay, this was information we hadn't integrated into our model_, Practical said. _How does it change our position?_

_Well_, Test It replied, _not much._ _But we'll have to be careful with this notebook. I suggest we remove the first page, the one with the instructions, ASAP. We should burn the page removed, too, not leave it in some trash can. Further, it'd be better if we removed every sheet we filled and did the sa-_

_Hold on_, his moral side spoke up. _You're actually thinking of filling a whole sheet?!_

_Ummm..._

_That's beyond the point_, interrupted Practical. _We have just found new information. If we just pretend to include it and then carefully justify why we're going to do the same thing anyway, we might as well just give up collecting information and do whatever we like._

_But there really isn't much of a change_, explained Common Sense. _Removing those pages was a good idea anyway, and we'd probably have thought of it sooner or later. Other than that, if we're careless enough that the fact that we're the son of a police officer starts mattering we've already lost._

His internal monologue (or dialogue?) was interrupted by a piece of chalk hitting his forehead and his teacher asking him to pay attention to class.

"Ah- sorry, sensei!" he replied, and promptly shifted his thoughts to a more class-welcoming pattern.

* * *

_4:02PM._

After class he decided he'd go for a walk and maybe buy some manga. He needed some time to think.

_We're removing the instructions page from the notebook. What else?_ Practical asked.

_Well, the cover itself is pretty awful. I say we remove that, too. And maybe we cross out the name of yesterday's guy. And today's person_, Test It replied. Light made a mental note about that. This part he'd labelled Test It was way too eager to do what would generally be considered bad.

But was it, really? Hadn't he thought, his whole life, that humanity was almost hopeless? And now he had a tool for Hope. He chewed on these thoughts as he entered the small shop and his second victim showed up.

"Hey, lady, wanna come hang out with us?" Light took note of the voice and the tone which had followed the sound of a few bikes arriving. He got in and chose a specific section of the manga shelves, not bothering to look at what section it was. He just wanted to be facing the window as the thugs - there was more than one - harassed a young girl outside. The one whose voice he had noted had shoulder-length dirty blond hair and was wearing shades, bright gold jewelry and a biker jacket.

"Whoa, Taku-san is going after a hottie!" Light heard through the door he'd strategically left slightly open to his left.

"Shibumaru Takuo, they call me Shibutaku," the man said, pointing a thumb to himself with a smug grin. "Hehe... go out with me, lady."

_Do it. You already have inform-_

_Shut up. He's just harassing a girl with words_, Light replied while the other three thugs cheered on their "leader." _That's not deserving of death._

_Is anything...?_ His moral side spoke up again in a whisper that was promptly ignored by the rest of him.

He opened a random manga and put his notebook in it, pretending to read it while he watched and waited.

"Come on, hottie, come with us!"

"No!" the girl said and tried getting away with no success.

"Hehehe... you better do what Taku said! He doesn't take no for an answer!" One of the nondescript thugs howled at that. Light's left eyebrow twitched, and his impassiveness became a frown when the "leader" tried to put a hand under the girl's coat.

_That's it_, Light thought as he quickly wrote the name he'd heard with 4 different possible spellings, always with the face of the thug in his mind. _The cause of death has to be specific enough to cover a tiny prior_, he thought and looked around casually, glancing at both sides of the street.

Empty.

_Run over by a truck_, he wrote beside each instance of the guy's name.

Then he waited. That tingling sensation was there again. His hands once more were shaking. Not with anticipation, not with fear, not with shock. With rage.

Okay, maybe just a little bit of anticipation.

_Are you sure you want to kill an innocent person?_ Moral asked.

_He's not innocent_, Test It answered. _He's actually trying to rape that girl._

_Does that make him deserve to die?_

_Yes_. This time, all other parts of Light agreed with Test It. Rape could sometimes be worse to the psychological development of a person than going to war. Some people never recovered, never managed to regain a regular life again. He could absolutely destroy this girl's life. But he wouldn't. Not anymore.

"Let go of me!" the girl said, and exactly five minutes after Light wrote the third variation of the name, she managed to get a hold of her purse and grabbed a can of pepper spray, pointing it at Takuo's face and looking defiant.

Takuo barked at that and tapped his shades. "You think this is going to work?" All four of them laughed, and Light heard the sound of a truck in the distance.

Six minutes. He was no longer pretending to read his manga. He watched and waited, sweating again.

Suddenly, as if inspired by some divine providence, the girl turned around and used the spray on one of the other thugs, one who wasn't wearing shades, and kicked Takuo's knee, who yelped and let go in surprise. She ran.

"AAAH! THAT BITCH!" said the one who was hit by the spray.

"SHE'S GETTING AWAY! GO GET HER!" said another one, and Takuo immediately climbed onto his bike.

Six minutes, thirty-five seconds. "You slut! I'll get you!" He kicked the bike into gear and accelerated.

Six minutes, thirty-eight seconds. The truck was finally visible.

Six minutes, thirty-nine seconds. "TAKU! LOOK OUT!"

Six minutes, forty seconds. The front of the truck hit the bike, killing the thug on impact.

Light's vision started to swim again, and he felt faint. He kept watching the scene in shock as people who heard the accident started to gather. The girl was long gone, and the other thugs started cursing and quickly left, too. Light followed suit.

* * *

_4:31PM._

_The death note is real._

_The death note is real._

_The death note is real._

That's all that went through his mind as he scrambled to his house, and when he was near enough, he slowed down as more coherent thoughts started to form.

_I've killed two people..._

He walked into an alley and threw up. His stomach was still churning, and he felt chills going through his body, as if he had a fever. His breath was coming in fast, ragged pieces, and his whole body was shaking as he propped himself against the wall.

_What have I done? How can this be real?_ This part of him didn't seem to have a name. It was just raw feeling. He stared at the floor, trying not to fall. Everything he believed was false...

_There must be some other explanation!_

_You know there isn't_, the guy he used to call Test It said. But now... maybe he should call him Death. _It was the death note, and you know it._

Yes... he knew it. That didn't make it any less terrifying.

He tried to assimilate that and couldn't. In his hands there was an artifact so powerful it could modify the state of the world in order to cause the death of anyone he wished. He could... he could... Hmm... what else could he do? What were the limits of that? And why was he feeling like that? He knew the world was now a slightly better place because he'd murdered those two.

_No. It's not murder. It's justice._

Why was that happening, then? But he knew the answer. No matter what his verbal, conscious side said about it, his raw lizard brain still existed and still reacted the way it was supposed to react to taking two human beings' lives.

_I have to... to go home._

* * *

_4:50PM._

And he did. He got home. And he had dinner as if nothing had happened, though he ate more than he usually did. Then he went to his room and immediately ripped off the death note's cover, back, instruction page and first page just for good measure. No one could know.

He stripped and went to the shower. He let the hot water wash over him, his mind completely blank. Until it wasn't.

_We killed two men._

_We cold bloodedly killed two men._

_We took their lives._

_We murdered them._

_We're murderers._

_We're monsters._

_No_, Death replied. _We're not. _They_ were monsters. _They_ were the rot of this world._

_Do you think Takuo deserved to die?_ Some unnamed part of him asked.

_Yes. Don't you? He was going to rape that girl. What do you think he deserved?_ Death replied. _Is the world a worse place, now that he's gone?_

No one answered.

_What's the price, though?_ Another part finally spoke up. _Our sanity? Our mind?_

_Is it such a high price to pay? For the betterment of the world? Do you think our mind isn't a fair, even cheap price? Do you really believe, O Master of Morality, that losing our mind while at the same time making the world a better place for everyone else isn't worth it? Are you as selfish as everyone else?_

_But it's all we have_, Practical said. _It's all we are. If we give it up, who are we? And how could we go on, without it?_

_Do we need to give it up, though? You've always said you wanted to change the world. To make it a place worth living. Here's your chance. Are you going to throw it away?_

Again, no answer for a while.

_Would you trust anyone else with this?_ Death continued, softly, his voice tempting. _Just think in utilitarian terms. Sure, killing is bad... but those people deserved it. The world is a better place without them. Do you know anyone else who would use these powers... for good? Unselfishly? You're thinking it right now. You were thinking it. You were thinking of unselfishly sacrificing our mind for the greater good._

_Do you think anyone could be a better shinigami than you?_

* * *

_4:16PM. December 3, 2003._

Five days later, Light got home from school and went to his room, locking his door behind himself as he was wont to do in the past few days. He grabbed a nondescript white notebook from his backpack and opened it. There were two pages missing, looking like they had been ripped off. On the first remaining page, there were two names followed by the words "heart attack," same date and different times. They were an hour apart and in two different languages. The date and time of the second one would happen in four minutes. He booted his computer, switched to the virtual machine and opened a nice little text document with many more names and locations on it.

That was when the actual shinigami showed up.

"Curious," a voice behind Light said, and he screamed and fell off his chair. The voice laughed.

"Light? Are you okay?" Light's mother's voice was heard from downstairs.

"Yes! It's just one of those online scare games!"

"Why are you so surprised? I'm the owner of the death note, shinigami Ryuk. Seems like you've realised that ain't no normal notebook." The creature that said those words looked like... a seven feet tall punk clown, to be quite descriptive. Its face was white, it wore leather and there was skull-themed jewelry here and there, including a huge belt and one golden skull earring. Its mouth was painted with what looked like the Joker's finest quality lipstick and the slightly open smile showed razor-sharp teeth. Its hair was pitch black and it had a somewhat hunched posture. The most salient feature, however, were his enormous red eyes that seemed to see through your soul.

Light slowly calmed himself down with deep breaths, and stood up. "I'd thought it was a metaphor for the user, but apparently it's not. So shinigami are real, eh? It's a pleasure to meet you, Ryuk."

The shinigami looked at bit uneasy at the matter-of-fact tone of Light and his speedy recovery of the shock. "Ehh... the pleasure is mine?"

"I am Yagami Light. I have a few questions for you."

"Oh?" Ryuk's facial expression should be unreadable - very few muscles actually moved -, but Light could identify curiosity and amusement on its face nonetheless.

_Careful..._

"What happens to me, now?"

"What?"

"I killed a bunch of people, but I'm not a shinigami. Is there any punishment? Do I become a shinigami?"

"Huh? What do you mean? I won't do anything to you."

That seemed to catch Light by surprise, though not too much. "Not... do anything?"

"Once the death note lands in the human world, it belongs to that world. It's now yours."

That gave Light pause. "Interesting. I see."

"If you don't want it, give it to someone else. But if you do that, I'll erase your memories concerning the death note. Also, you won't be able to see me." As the strange creature - who had wings, now Light noticed, leathery feathery wings - explained that, it opened the window and flew to the top of a streetlight. "Because you and only you touched the notebook, you and only you can see and hear me. The death note is the bond that ties the human Yagami Light and the shinigami Ryuk together. For as long as you are alive or want the notebook, you will have it and retain your memories and your ability to see me."

_Bond... Fascinating._ Light decided to hold off judgment until he had more information, since it seemed to be so forthcoming.

"So... there's no consequence whatsoever to what I'm doing?"

"Oh, well... there's the stress and fear this provokes in a human, suspiciously lacking in you. And also, when you die..." He flew back inside. "I'll write your name on my notebook. And you won't go to either Heaven nor Hell."

"Oh. So Heaven and Hell exist, then?"

Ryuk seemed taken aback. "What?"

"Well, it's one thing to accept the veracity of a killer notebook, but it's a whole other thing to claim there is an afterlife. So you're saying that everyone I kill goes to an afterlife but I won't? And how is that afterlife? Can you tell me?"

Ryuk's eyes were somehow wider. "I... can't. It's against the... the rules." Light marked that behaviour as highly suspicious and worthy of further investigation, but changed the subject.

"So, do all death notes come with instructions? You're shinigami, shouldn't you know this already? And why was this death note here? Shouldn't it be with you in... in... Heaven or Hell or wherever it is shinigami live?"

The shinigami looked increasingly surprised and even (Light suspected) pleased. Light still found it very mysterious that he could identify Ryuk's facial expressions with only minute changes in specific locations and suspected maybe he was in fact projecting what he expected to see there. He took note of that, also. "Well... ah... you see," the creature started, and changed its posture. Now, somehow, it started to look menacing, as if the shadows around it had shifted or something. Light was unfazed. "I wrote the instructions in English and dropped the notebook here... because I was bored," it explained. "This may sound weird coming from a shinigami but... I just didn't feel alive. Being a shinigami these days is so boring. We're either sleeping or gambling. You write a few human names in the death note and they laugh at you for working so hard. Killing humans from the shinigami world isn't fun at all. And writing shinigami names in the notebook doesn't do anything. So I figured it'd be more fun to be down here."

There were multiple shinigami. Got it. "Do shinigami..." Then Light realised what time it was and quickly turned around, picking the first name from his list and writing it on the nondescript notebook that was open on his desk, choosing a time of death exactly an hour after the previous one. The shinigami, who was floating without moving his wings, peeked over his shoulder.

"What's that?" it asked. Light turned to look at Ryuk again, relieved he didn't miss his window.

"It's your notebook. Don't you recognise it?"

The shinigami grabbed it without asking and looked at the three names written, the lack of instructions and cover. "What did you do to my notebook?!" Its voice, so calm and steady before, was now loud and angry, almost heavy, and for the first time Light felt threatened. Here was a (probably) thousands of years old supernatural creature angry with him. But he held his pose.

"Well, I couldn't just go around with a dark notebook called 'Death Note' and instructions on how to kill people plus a bunch of names of dead people in it, could I? Especially given my dad's a police officer, that would be too suspicious."

"Ah..." Ryuk sounded as if it hadn't thought of that before. "But there's only three names..."

"Yes, of course, I also removed the pages with the other names. It would be just stupid to leave them here, too. I burned them. Speaking of which," and Light snatched the notebook from an astounded shinigami's hands and used his pen to cross out the two other names many times until they were impossible to read. "Always cover your tracks."

The shinigami's eyes got a bit wider at him, but Light felt he could sense frank admiration there. "Pages? So you already filled pages with this?"

"Well, it was in fact only one page. At first, I thought it'd be better if I just randomly picked a time and place for each victim. If I concentrate all my victims in Kanto, it will soon become obvious that that's a pattern. But choosing random times during the day wouldn't be efficient; the gain isn't proportional to the work. Besides, I couldn't be bothered," he said, his tone a little bit condescending. "I kill one person per hour, and always from a randomly selected time zone in the globe. So the only pattern is temporal, and that wouldn't be enough to actually pinpoint with any accuracy the source. Someone from anywhere could be doing that, so I'm mostly safe."

The shinigami looked too astounded for words for a few seconds, and Light mentally patted himself on the back for this accomplishment: shock a supernatural being to silence. It slowly reached again for the notebook and stared at it. Meanwhile, Light erased from the word document the name he'd just written and grabbed one six-sided die and one four-sided die. He started throwing them and writing down the numbers he got when Ryuk said, "So you've killed 96 people so far."

"Actually, it's a hundred and five, I made a few tests before with some lowly criminals. After I confirmed the power of the notebook, I only needed to know a few more details."

"Criminals?" The shinigami put the notebook back, and Light continued throwing his dice.

"Yes. You see, Ryuk, this world's gotten rotten. Everyone is incredibly selfish, and even those who aren't are nowhere near being efficient at being good. Some people just destroy other people's lives on a whim, like it's no big deal. But with exclusively public information that can be - somewhat - easily found on the internet, I can start cleaning this mess. Of course," he explained, gesticulating with his hands, "I don't just write the name of anyone who pops on the news. I have to make sure they're actually guilty of those crimes and the world will be a better place without them. These are all people about whom I've researched", he pointed to the screen where the list of names and faces was still open, "and who I found to be... bad for society."

"And you put all causes of death as 'heart attack' even though the default is already that," the shinigami observed.

"Yes. If I don't put a cause of death after the name, I can't choose a time of death - I tested it -, and I needed that. Additionally, I don't want people to ignore this. I want them to notice. That's also one of the reasons why I left the temporal pattern. I want them to know I'm passing judgment. I want them to know there's an overlord. If you do evil, you will be punished. That way, no one will do evil anymore!" Light was grinning, and in fact looked a little manic. He hadn't noticed he'd stood up, but standing he was, and even Ryuk looked a little frightened... and very amused. "In fact, evil's just a cool phrase. But someone whose impact on humanity is negative... those deserve to die."

"So you'll be the only evil one left," Ryuk replied, getting more amused as time progressed.

"What are you talking about? I'm the savior," he explained. "I'm Japan's number 1 honor student. And I will be... the god of this world!" Then he started laughing, cackling, really. Until he stopped, and his laugh became more childish. "No, sorry, I'm just kidding. I just want to make the world a better place." He frowned a bit. "Killing is bad. No one should kill. But sometimes... sometimes it's the best thing to do. Batman's insane. Everyone thinks he's some sort of paragon of virtue because he refuses to kill the Joker, but what about all the unnamed, faceless people the Joker kills? They're all on Batman. Batman could stop all that. He could just kill the Joker. But he won't, and much more people are dead because of him.

"I'm not Batman," he explained with a smirk. "And I won't let all those Jokers get their way. I'll make the world better, unlike anything Batman has ever done for Gotham City."

Ryuk's smile widened somehow. _Humans are so... interesting!_

Then Light sat down and asked: "By the way, Ryuk, is there a god? Other than shinigami, that is?"

* * *

_xx:xx. December 4, 2003. Interpol emergency council._

"That's more than a hundred just this week..."

"From all over the world, it seems!"

"Only criminals, incarcerated or just wanted."

"All of a heart attack..."

"These are only the ones we know, there must be many more!"

Someone, somehow, had access to the cameras of the meeting. He was wearing a plain white shirt and plain blue jeans, sitting on the wooden floor of an empty room except for the computer showing those images. _So Interpol is finally acting... I won't be able to avoid helping the police on a case like this._


	2. Investigation

_A/N: Light mentions the use of Tor. Information about it can be found on its Wikipedia page because this website blocks links._

* * *

_xx:xx. December 4, 2003. Interpol emergency council._

Flags from all member countries of the ICPO decorated the large room's walls. A large number of desks overlooked an empty dais, with each row of desks on a higher level than the one in front of it. The people sitting at the desks were discussing loudly with each other, which resulted in a complete confusion of ideas, suggestions and thoughts - but mostly just lots of outraged yells.

"The death toll is over a hundred, even just the ones we know of."

"Well, who cares? They're all mass murderers or worse. I say they deserve to die!"

"What did you just say? Are you crazy?"

"Who could do such a thing? The killings are spread all over the world. This must be some huge organisation..."

"It's the CIA or the FBI!"

"What did you just say?!"

"We'll have to call L to help us solve this," one voice said silencing them all.

And for a few seconds that silence reigned. Then the murmurs restarted, and once again evolved into a cacophony of parallel conversations.

Most of the chiefs in the room brought an entourage, and on occasion that included a few promising young policemen. One of these, Matsuda Touta, leaned over to his boss, who was following the conversation intently but not participating.

"Who's L, chief?" The young police officer asked Yagami Soichiro.

"Oh, right, this is your first meeting," he whispered back. "L is... a private investigator of sorts. No one knows what their real identity is. They have helped us with many impossible cases in the past. But the thing is, we can't contact them. They're our last resort, and they only come when they're interested."

At that moment, a deep male voice overwhelmed the general noise. "Ladies and gentlemen, L is already on it," it started. Everyone looked at the dais, where the amplified voice had come from, and saw a man wearing an overcoat, a hat and shades that hid his face.

"Who's that?" Matsuda asked.

"That's Watari, L's personal assistant. We also have no idea who he is. L rarely speaks with us and usually just tells Watari what they want."

"L has already started working on this case," he continued, "and is requesting your full cooperation. They believe these deaths are being caused by a mass murderer. The situation is incredibly atypical, however, and without the aforementioned full cooperation we can't begin to hope to solve this." Everyone remained completely silent as Watari spoke. "L says this may be the hardest case they have yet faced, and while they have some idea on how to start the investigations, they believe this murderer may be too smart for normal methods.

"We'll need to be careful, and use every resource available."

* * *

_4:23PM. December 5, 2003. Tokyo, Japan._

"I'm home!" Light called when he arrived. His mother acknowledged his greeting as he went to his bedroom with Ryuk on his tail. After he sat down at his desk he opened his backpack and took out the nondescript white notebook from it. Ryuk, as always, peeked over his shoulder as he performed his ritual of grabbing the dice and rolling them to decide what time zones he'd take each victim from. "You know, Ryuk, there is a flaw in my anonymity plan."

"Eh?" He sounded surprised. During the past few days he'd developed a sort of admiration for the human boy, who always seemed to be one step ahead of... everyone, really. He was now floating above the bed, eating an apple - it turned out that, while shinigami didn't need to eat, Ryuk really enjoyed apples. "What flaw?"

Light waited for Tor (an online anonymity network) to connect on his virtual machine as he explained. "My first victim. He wasn't a famous, big criminal, so only someone living in Japan could have seen him. The sole non-Japanese news I found about him online showed up after his mysterious death. Of course," he continued, "it's possible that some non-Japanese person with the death note would pick a Japanese TV station to watch at random, but the odds are pretty low, and I killed him while he was on live TV. Very few people can actually speak Japanese. Even I can only speak Japanese and English, although with translation tools I have access to quite a wide range of online sources." He closed his eyes and thought for a while. Ryuk chewed on his apple, his ever-present creepy smile widening a bit. The slow, deliberate chewing noises irritated Light, but that was just a silly irrational peeve. "I guess there's no way around that. It was a stupid mistake, and I never realised it. It might be a problem. But then again, it might not. Here's to hoping."

The names of the people he'd found and planned to kill were all in a thrice password protected area of his computer that could not - or so he hoped - be accessed while the computer was connected to the internet. He had a word document organised by time zone with the names, faces and crimes of each person. As soon as he wrote their names on the death note, he erased them from the document.

"Look at this," Light said as he opened a website to show Ryuk. It had an intricately designed heart pattern with wings, gold against a black background, and presented the text:

_THE LEGEND OF THE SAVIOR KIRA._

_Criminals worldwide are dying one after another because Kira is amongst us. He is the one who will tolerate no wickedness, our messenger from Hell. Only those who believe in his existence may enter this site._

"Quite colourful, isn't it? I believe this was from the failed Japanese pronunciation of the word _killer_. I'm not sure I like the sound of it," he said, rolling his eyes a little bit, "but websites like this one are popping one after another, and it seems all of them have decided that's my name, now." He entered the website and scrolled past a few blog entries as he talked. "Official media still refers to these deaths as 'the strange and frequent heart attacks of heinous criminals,' but there are people who believe, correctly of course, that someone is behind all this." He turned his chair around to face the shinigami, who had that disturbingly amused look on his face again. Light himself wore a perfectly neutral expression as he talked. "Do you see what this means? It's working. People are aware there's someone. A person behind all this."

"Eh... Light... you told me the other day that you were kidding when you said you wanted to be god. Isn't that a bit god-ish for you?" Ryuk swallowed the last bit of the apple, still floating, and turned upside down.

"Yes, but that's a necessary consequence," explained the boy, smiling at the aerial tricks of the creature. "Whenever people see correlation, they suppose purposefulness - false positives, most of the time. And whenever that purposefulness is vague and threatening, they believe it's a god." He turned around again and closed the browser. Ryuk couldn't see the smile that touched Light's lips for a split second as he read 'SAVIOR KIRA' again. "It's the only reason religions exist in the first place. They saw thunder, they imagined a god of thunder. They saw fire, they imagined a god of fire. Now they see death, and they imagine a shinigami. But I don't mind. They have to know there's someone. They don't have to know who that someone is. I'll be... the Dark Knight." He chuckled to himself.

"We interrupt your programming to bring you an important message from the ICPO. This is being broadcast all over the world." _ICPO?_ Light looked at his TV and turned the volume up so he could listen. _Wasn't dad at a meeting there a few days ago?_ "Japanese voiceover is provided by translator Yoshio Anderson."

"My name is Lind L. Taylor, widely known as 'L.'" The voice came from a man who looked young and had dark, straight hair that framed his face.

* * *

_xx:xx. December 4, 2003. Interpol emergency council._

Watari's head turned to the general direction of the Japanese entourage, though the shades prevented anyone from seeing the actual focus of his eyes. Still, Yagami believed he could almost feel the gaze on him, and wasn't surprised when the mysterious man spoke.

"Mr. Yagami, L has reason to believe the killer is Japanese. They will need your help. They will try something, just on the off chance that it works. L believes that it's possible they may be overestimating the intelligence of this murderer, but they aren't sure. Therefore, they will attempt to ascertain whether those responsible are really as dangerous as some fear. They want to gauge the killer's intelligence."

* * *

_4:46PM. December 5, 2003. Tokyo, Japan._

"To the perpetrator of all these serial murders: you have committed the most abominable act in history. I will personally catch you, the one causing these horrible deaths, at any cost."

_Whoa_, Death said. _That's a threat right there. I think we should do something about it._

_You know, you're a bit trigger happy_, Common Sense said. _He's not a murderer. He's an investigator that helps the ICPO. What do you think the result of killing him will be?_

_Erm..._

_That's a no_, Practical agreed.

"Kira, I think I have a pretty good idea of what you're trying to do and why you're doing it. But that is evil!"

_He's right, you know_, Moral said.

_We've been over this already_, Practical grunted. _Yes, it's "evil" as a general rule - and you should really not throw that word around -, but we're doing it only on strict necessity. We're only killing those without whom the world is better off._

_That's just rationalising murder_, pointed out Moral.

_Maybe so_, Death said. _But Practical has a point. We're not about to just start questioning our motives, are we? Besides, why do you even call yourself Moral anyway? Your morality is an outdated evolutionary hack. We think you should leave._

_Aye_, said Practical.

_Aye_, said Common Sense.

_Aye_, said Light himself.

There was no answer from Moral.

Light stopped paying attention to the man on the TV, returned the notebook to its place and grabbed his homework. He focused on it for a few minutes, until...

_But what if he does catch us?_ Death asked after some time, his voice soft and seductive. For a while, no one replied. Then he continued._ If he was stupid enough to show us his face and his name, he couldn't have been a very good asset to the Interpol in the first place. And if he dies, whatever perks he might have that drew the Interpol to him in the first place will be lost._

_It's a net positive utility._

* * *

_xx:xx. December 8, 2003. Interpol emergency council._

A few days later, at a new Interpol meeting called by L, Watari was waiting for everyone to sit. When they did, he cleared his throat, and the amplified sound of it made everyone become silent, echoing through the chamber in an authoritative manner.

"L's plan didn't work exactly as he'd expected. They believe the odds that Kira is Japanese are very good." He cleared his throat again. "Lind L. Taylor, to those of you who do not know, was a murderer scheduled to die at the date he showed up on TV pretending to be L in Japan. He died of a heart attack a few hours after his last announcement. Other death sentence victims played the same part in other countries, and many of them died afterwards, too." The sound of whispers now could be heard from everywhere.

"What happened, Chief?" Matsuda asked again.

"L wanted to figure out where in Japan Kira was, so he made this Lind L. Taylor assume their identity and made that announcement in Japan in hopes of luring Kira out somehow. Simultaneous transmissions were made with different criminals appearing on TV all over the globe, mostly to keep up the pretence but also just in case Kira wasn't in fact Japanese. Taylor was the first to die, but every other one of them died too, all of them after their transmission. L believes this is evidence for Kira being Japanese." The director himself looked a bit unconvinced.

"Couldn't Kira have gotten this information by coincidence?"

"He could. I think L must have thought of that, though."

"L will need a team of your top investigators to start immediately." There was a commotion at this. "They believe Mr. Yagami should lead the team. The Interpol should decide on how to best handle this situation. In a week, L will want to hear what you ladies and gentlemen have to say."

Watari then turned and left, while the Interpol organised themselves - which is to say, everyone started to talk at the same time in confusion.

* * *

_7:12PM. December 5, 2003. Tokyo, Japan._

"That's strange..."

"What is it, Light?" Ryuk floated over to look at Light's computer screen.

It'd been a few hours since Taylor showed up on TV, and he still wasn't dead. "This person doesn't look like... Taylor..." Then he stopped talking and his eyes widened in terror as comprehension dawned on him. _Oh, no... Oh no, no, no..._

On his screen, one of the Saviour Kira websites was open, a British one, and it showed a lengthy rant about the Interpol allying with an investigator called L... who was a female and whose name was, apparently, Jane B. Angelo. _No, no, no..._ He looked up other international websites dedicated to Kira and each of them showed a different L. He clicked and clicked and clicked and somehow there was a different L for each couple of countries. Some of them - the USA, England, China, Japan - got one person all for themselves. By then, a number of those websites had picked up on this already and were choosing one of two stances: L was in fact all of those people, or none of them.

Ryuk watched, fascinated and with growing amusement. "Light... I think they got you."

"NO," he said, then stopped himself.

_I told you_, Common Sense said.

_Shut up_, Death and Light replied.

_No. You shouldn't just kill people like that. You shouldn't leave the pattern. You made a mistake_, Practical commented.

_No..._

_You made a mistake_, the voice he used to call Moral continued, _and it was an easily avoidable mistake_. Maybe he should call it Cautious.

_How? How could I-_

_You know exactly how you could. You're Kira. They would never send the small guns after you. You thought L was just some random pawn and your arrogance turned against you._

"No," he said out loud, but it sounded like a question to his ears. "No, that's nothing. I already suspected they'd learn I was Japanese." He wasn't quite succeeding at convincing himself. His voice was breaking and he was trembling. "I can't kill back in time to change that..." Then he eyed Ryuk suspiciously. "Or can I?"

"Kukuku... We're shinigami, not gods of time," answered the strange creature, looking way too cheerful. Light decided he'd deprive the shinigami of apples for a while. But anyway, he nodded. As he'd suspected.

_Let's be rational. The mistake has been made. What can be done now to help?_ And he thought of an idea. He heard a gasp coming from the depths of his mind as it formed, but he quickly reasoned it was necessary. They couldn't know he was Japanese. He'd make it much more difficult. If they caught him, many more people than just that handful of actors would die...

He spent the next two hours looking up the names of the other Ls around the world and writing their names. After he was done, he ripped the full pages off, put them in his first desk drawer and closed the notebook. Ryuk had spent that entire time watching in fascination. Light looked at himself and felt his clothes sticking to him and his heart racing. His whole body was tense, and he felt he'd just escaped sure death.

"They might still know I'm Japanese, but they might believe this was all random, too."

_Random murdering of innocents, you mean_, Moral said. None of the others except for Death, who was quickly shooshed, had anything to say to that. It was true.

"L is still alive, and whoever they are, I underestimated their intelligence."

* * *

_xx:xx. December 15, 2003. A dark room with a bright monitor somewhere._

L stared at the monitor as Watari entered the conference room a week later. "Watari," he said as he pressed a key on his computer to let him speak to the man, "ask them to invite Klein to the team in Japan."

* * *

_9:02AM. December 16, 2003. Kira Task Force Headquarters, Tokyo, Japan._

Yagami Soichiro was a tall, powerful man. His greying hair, square glasses, moustache and usual grey suit gave him a very professional look. He sat at a desk in the headquarters of the recently created Vicious Criminal Serious Murder Special Investigative Force, or informally Kira Task Force, in Tokyo. Watari was sitting at the back with a notebook and his face covered as usual. The other investigators, from all over the world, every now and then glanced nervously in his direction. He seemed not to notice, focused on whatever was on his screen.

"Yagami-sama, we have the report ready," one of the investigators told him.

"Let's hear it. Watari-san," he said that last word a little bit louder, "you might want to let L hear this, too."

Watari almost imperceptibly nodded and turned on the relay. "L, you will now hear the report."

"Good," the electronically distorted voice was heard by Watari only.

"All the victims were discoverable from Japan, but only through the internet - that is, they were also discoverable from anywhere else with an internet connection. They were all people arrested for or suspected of heinous crime such as planned murder, rape and torture. None of them were people who committed one-shot impassioned crimes or accidents. The times of death were always during the first minute of each hour of the day. The places these victims come from seem to follow a statistically random pattern as opposed to what a layman would believe a random process should look like. During the collecting of the data there were some windows between deaths that were longer than an hour, but most of them were eventually filled by a death that hadn't been previously noted. Currently there are still some hours of some days that don't correspond to any murders on record, but more information is being gathered as we speak."

An apprehensive silence followed that report, which eventually was broken by Watari. "L wants to know what parts of the published information of the victims all of them had in common."

"Apparently name, location and picture of the criminal and description of the crime are the only features that are found consistently amongst all victims, with the one notable exception of Lind L. Taylor, whose name was mentioned only briefly in a few news outlets in the U.S.A. and whose face only became public during the announcement," the one reporting the data promptly replied. Then another investigator got up and started their report.

"So far, we've received 3029 calls regarding the case. The vast majority are from curious civilians wanting to know whether the broadcast, L and Kira are real. Fourteen calls were along the lines of 'I know Kira' and 'I saw Kira.' We've followed up and recorded all of them. Twenty-one calls were from people claiming to be Kira, which were also followed up and recorded."

After that, one young officer got up and the other investigator sat down. Matsuda Touta was a man of average height and build and straight black hair. His face was somewhat childish and beardless, though his posture and suit were serious and his tone was very down-to-business. "In the past few days, criminal activity all over the world has decreased dramatically. There seems to be no order to the decrease, but it can be more strongly detected in most countries where the general populace has access to news concerning the case."

The uneasy silence was somehow loud after that, heavy. The investigators traded glances but it seemed they were afraid to even breathe. Once again, Watari broke it. "L wants to be sent a copy of the full report, and wants to know whether Klein has arrived."

This time, Yagami was the one who answered. "The report will be sent through whatever forms of communication L chooses to disclose to us." His tone of voice was dry and somewhat resentful. "Mieke Klein hasn't arrived yet, but her flight is scheduled for tonight. She should be here in two days at most."

Watari remained silent for a few seconds, and then said, "L will be looking forward to working with Klein and with the team already assembled. They thank you for all your effort, and say they believe that with this information, this case may not be unsolvable after all." The effect of that one statement was subtle, but instantaneous. The wording was carefully chosen, of course. It implied even L had had no expectations of solving it, but what they'd learned had given him hope, so further developments would likely point them in the right direction. As Watari closed his laptop and got up to leave, the mood in the room had perceptibly improved, and people seemed to have recovered the drive to work.

* * *

_6:16PM. December 16, 2003. Yagami household, Tokyo, Japan._

"So the solution of the quadratic equation is really just a consequence of the way it is set, you see? If you ever forget it, you can just rederive it from that," Light explained to his young sister Sayu in his room. Ryuk watched the exchange, looking bored, floating above the bed.

"You're so smart, Light-kun! The sensei should've taught us that! All he did was throw that formula on the board and tell us to memorise it!" She puffed her cheeks and Light laughed.

"Yes, but now you can teach all your friends!" They heard the noise of the door being unlocked downstairs. "Oh, dad's home. We should go down to have dinner with him."

"Yes!" she replied and quickly got up and moved towards the door.

"But Sayu, you need to practice! If you don't do the exercises you won't remember."

"Gotcha," she said, and left, followed by Light and Ryuk.

"I'm home!" Light heard his dad saying as he walked downstairs. "Hello, Sayu, Light."

"Hi dad!" Sayu greeted and hugged him.

"Hello, dad. Let's eat?"

"Sure, I'll be right there," answered Yagami Soichiro.

* * *

_6:27PM._

"So, Light, how's school?" Soichiro asked between bites.

"Eh? Ah, same ol', same ol'..." he replied with poorly concealed pride.

"So still at the top of the class," his dad said with a chuckle. "And you, Sayu?"

She had been grinning at her brother but then stopped and held back a snicker. "Oh, same ol', same ol'..." Everyone laughed.

A few more minutes passed in silence, until Light said, "Hey, dad, how's the Kira case going?"

"Kira case?" Ryuk asked, surprised. He was floating just behind Light, who ignored him.

"It's like trying to catch a ghost. This guy's really careful."

The corner of Light's lips twitched imperceptibly, but luckily no one was looking when that happened. "Do you have any clues? Any ideas?"

"Now, Light, I know you want to work at the police when you grow up, but this case is classified. I can't disclose this information to you or anyone. I'm sorry, it's not that I don't trust you, but rules are rules."

"I'm sorry," Light said, sounding the teeniest bit bitter. That Soichiro caught.

"I know you want to help, and your help has been invaluable in the past, but this case is strictly confidential, and not even the investigators working on it have full access to all the info."

"I understand. Don't worry about it," Light replied with a smile. "I'm just being silly."

"This is so interesting..." Ryuk remarked to no one.

* * *

_7:00PM._

"Eh, Light, your dad is not only a cop, but he's also working on the Kira case, huh? That must be quite a lot of pressure," Ryuk commented with mock concern as they walked back into his room - or rather, Light walked and Ryuk hovered.

"Quite the contrary. It means I can use his computer to figure out details of the case. In fact, I can assess exactly how much of a threat this L can be. Their plan was much smarter than I'd suspected, putting an actor to pretend he's them and confirm my location." His lips twisted, then, and his brows furrowed. Light had looked up the names of the people who L had used as puppets. They'd all been found guilty of exactly the type of crimes Kira despised. So they weren't innocents.

_It wasn't that bad, was it?_ Death asked tentatively.

_You didn't know that. You just killed a bunch of people you thought were innocent. Because of your pride and arrogance._ Moral once again was the last to speak, and even Light himself felt his stomach churn as he thought these things at himself.

"I won't let him catch me by surprise like that again," he said, and smiled a smile that didn't quite reach his eyes. Ryuk shuddered at the sight. The human boy looked more terrifying than a shinigami.

_If this L person is helping the police... I wonder who they are._

* * *

_8:59AM. December 17, 2003. Kira Task Force Headquarters, Tokyo, Japan._

There was a knock on the door of the headquarters. Without waiting for an answer, the door was opened and an austere-looking woman walked in. She was in her thirties, tall and, in spite of the cold hardness of her face, beautiful. She wore glasses and her blond hair was wrapped in a ponytail. Her suit was black, and her high heels clicked against the floor as she walked with confident, strong steps.

"How may I help you?" Yagami asked, the shadow of a frown forming on his face because of the stranger's interruption.

"I believe L requested my help. I am Mieke Klein," she answered in a strongly accented Japanese. "I am a psychologist, anthropologist and criminal profiler." She talked like she walked: confidently, surely, strongly. Her voice was loud and clear, and even through her thick accent it was always possible to understand what she was saying. There was a small smile on her face, a smile that said _I'm good at what I do, I know it, you know it, and it makes you furious_.

Everyone looked a bit shocked at the woman's presence, except for Yagami himself. "Yes, of course. Do you want the report?"

"No need. L has already sent me the relevant details. I believe we can further this investigation and significantly narrow down the possible suspects." Watari watched the woman, and the webcam attached to his laptop showed a gleeful L the image of her arrival. "They have asked me to profile this criminal so we can find him. When can I start?"

"Following the report," Yagami answered. "Matsuda?"

Matsuda got up, and his tone was the same down-to-business one of before. He wanted to be taken seriously by his peers, who judged him because of his age. His ambition and drive did him credit, however, and even Klein raised her eyebrows at the power the young man emanated. "The pattern has continued. Twenty registered deaths in the past twenty-four hours, hourly except for a few missing spots. Previous missing spots were filled with other confirmed deaths by heart attack of criminals in more remote parts of the world. Nothing more to report."

"Thank you, Matsuda. Klein-sama, would you care to elucidate us on this murderer's personality?"

"Certainly." Matsuda sat down again while Klein walked to Yagami's desk at the other end of the room and turned around, her back to Yagami but facing everyone else - Watari included. "Our killer is likely male, between 20 and 34 years of age. He is brilliant and knows that, but he is also arrogant and prideful, and very methodical and meticulous. His murder of Taylor and the other fake Ls shows that he doesn't like being challenged, and will kill even when he doesn't know his target is a criminal if he believes that will help him achieve his goals. His goals, of course, are to rid the world of evil. He believes he is doing a purging, a cleansing, and might even fancy himself a supreme judge over humanity. He has cleverly hidden his identity by killing always one person per hour, never concentrating his murders at any one time frame that might incriminate him. That also suggests his reach is temporal in addition to spatial."

"H-hold on," one investigator said. "You're saying that all of this was caused by only one person? And he can kill whomever and whenever he wants? How?"

"Bear with me," Klein answered patiently. "Yes, we believe it is a single person, or perhaps one person heading a team. But the mastermind is only one, yes. As to how... we can't rule out very advanced technology, but all autopsies so far revealed natural causes. I beg your suspension of disbelief here. L and I have come to the conclusion that... the means may be supernatural." Her mouth twitched at that, L noticed through the webcam. _Yes, I know it's hard to swallow... but it looks like the most plausible option_, L thought as he saw the room fall into disarray and chaos.

"Supernatural? What do you mean?"

"Is he a demon?"

"What if he's really a god? A shinigami?"

"Don't be silly, there's no such-"

"He's killing people all over the world with heart attacks! It's the only explanation."

"Silence!" Yagami shouted, and everyone quieted down immediately. His face held a deep frown, wrinkling his foreheads and pursing his lips. "Please, let Klein-san continue."

"Thank you," she replied. "Yes, supernatural. The victims are completely randomly distributed, all dying of heart attacks in the first sixty seconds of each hour. These victims range from those in solitary confinement to those being tried, including some who were cleared of all charges and even some that were missing." Her lips pressed into a thin line as she thought about what to say, how to explain. "As I said, we cannot rule out extremely advanced technology. But however he does it, it is clear that Kira is capable of deeds that would not be thought possible by ordinary means. Even if it's not supernatural, we should label it so at least as a mental warning that we have absolutely no idea how he is doing it." She let that sink in, let the people murmur, whisper, talk. It was better that way. When she felt they had mostly digested the news, she continued with the good ones. "He has, however, not been perfectly careful. If he has such fine control over time of death, that probably means he somehow schedules the deaths beforehand. But it seems like he creates that schedule at a regular rate, instead of having scheduled all those deaths at some point in the past and just watching them happen." A few murmurs started at that. "If that were the case, most deaths would take a few days to happen after the victims showed up on the news. Taylor and the other fake Ls are the prime examples of people dying on the same day their faces appear on the news, followed by people who appeared much earlier. This line of reasoning assumes that he cannot change the schedule after he set it - and we believe this is the case because otherwise he wouldn't have had any reason to kill the other fake Ls immediately afterwards unless it was to cover his blunder with Taylor once he found out." The murmurs got louder. "The only way to keep it watertight like this while at the same time updating it with recent information would be to recreate the schedules at least daily."

The murmurs were now open conversation, but one investigator asked something that made everyone else quiet down again: "And how do you know all that?"

Klein smiled. "There's a reason we talk about a Modus Operandi when we describe serial killers. They all have a preferred form of killing, and a ritual. They are highly organised people, and generally can be very upset if their carefully built plan is somehow messed with. This killer shows that with his strict obedience to time of death. Always the first minute of every hour."

"And how does that help us?"

"I second that question," Yagami said. "I'm not sure how that information can help us catch him."

"His first kill didn't fit the pattern," Klein answered. "His first murder was a man named Otoharada Kurou, you can look him up, and it was made during the screening of the crime on TV. And after that one, it took another couple of days for him to actually start his schedule."

Watari cleared his throat, and then spoke. "L believes we can get clues from that murder. And there might possibly have been others. Indeed, L believes Kira may have been testing his powers at that time. If he had already had complete information about what he could do, he wouldn't have been so sloppy."

This time, for the first time, a few investigators, including Yagami and Matsuda, were nodding at Watari's announcement instead of just staring dumbfounded. L saw that through the webcam. _Good_, he thought. _They're catching up. We can't have people who are constantly surprised at the most obvious developments and ideas. They will be a hindrance instead of an aid._

"Matsuda. I need you to head a small unit to research possible other deaths of criminals between Otoharada Kurou and Gabriel Heinsterr." A grin crossed Matsuda's young face before being replaced by his usual serious expression. He wanted to show he was responsible, L believed, and just nodded as he started gathering people he trusted.

L smiled at the whole exchange behind his computer screen. Matsuda looked very promising, and Captain Yagami remembered by heart the names of the first recorded victims. L hadn't been wrong to choose that man to head this team, and apparently he wasn't much less picky with his own. "Is there anything else we should be informed of, L? Klein-san?"

"As far as I'm aware, we're done for now. I would like to be notified if any further patterns are found in the deaths," Klein answered.

"L says you should, once again, pay especially close attention to the times of death of these criminals," Watari said, then closed his laptop and got up, walking toward the exit.

* * *

_5:30PM._

Yagami was the last to leave the headquarters. When he did, he was surprised to find Watari standing beside the door. "Yagami-sama. Do you mind if we speak in private?"

"Not at all. My office?"

The headquarters was in the police building, and Yagami's office was on the top floor of that building. They headed in that direction, and as they walked in, Yagami locked the door and said, "Please, sit." Watari did as instructed while the chief sat on the other side of the now mostly empty desk. Since this case began, it hadn't seen much use. Now he spent most of his time at the headquarters. "What do they have in mind?"

"L believes this team is too large. Too many non-expert people, too slow on the uptake. We need only the best minds on this team."

"Yes," Yagami sighed, "I agree. The team needs a reduction. And tighter security. I didn't keep any of the case files in my personal computer as I generally do - it's just too dangerous, and most of my cases aren't classified anyway - but there are still too many ways this could leak."

L, who was always watching Watari's actions, watched his respect for the man grow. "What do you suggest?"

"I'll handle it. Don't worry. Was there anything else?"

"No, that was all. Thank you for your time, Yagami-sama."

* * *

_5:02PM._

"You're looking agitated, Liiiiight-kuuuun. What's up, Liiiiiiight?" Ryuk floated and ate an apple as he watched Light pace around his room. After his ritual the boy had tried doing his homework but failed and started fidgeting and pacing instead.

He didn't answer. There was a mental debate going on in his mind. There had been no update to my father's computer's case folder in more than two weeks, Light thought.

_Do you think he's onto us? Do you think he's hiding it from us?_ Death asked, sounding worried.

_Don't be silly_, Common Sense replied. _This is the most important case of his career. We have killed more than two hundred and eighty people. Have you ever heard of a serial killer with this many murders? Especially in such a short time?_

Light slowed down his pace and smiled a bit when he thought of that, but then immediately frowned. _We're not serial killers. We're justice._

_We're killing people in series_, explained Common Sense, slowly and carefully. _We even have an M.O.! We're serial killers. The fact that our killing is just doesn't make it any less killing. Don't try to pretend you don't know that. Don't try to diminish what we're doing. We are killing people, and that is bad._

_Yes, but it's a necessary evil! We're not the Batman, if we have the power to st-_

_Yes, we _know_ about the Batman_, Practical interjected impatiently. _The fact that these killings, in the end, have a positive impact doesn't mean killing is a good thing. Never forget that. They are people who didn't want to die, same as us, same as everyone else._

_But they deserved it_, Death said.

_Yes. They did_, Practical conceded.

_We're drifting from the subject here. Without dad's computer, we won't know anything about the investigation. That will leave us vulnerable._

They all thought about that. Practical said, _We need to hack into the police's computers, then._

_Oh, like it's easy?_ Common Sense replied with annoyance._ It's one thing to hack into your dad's personal computer at home, but trying to get into the über protected servers of the police? Insane._

None of his parts had any reply to that. It was insane. Hacking into the police computers wasn't an option.

"Light?" Ryuk sounded concerned. He snapped out of his internal dialogue.

"Sorry. I was thinking. My dad's computer doesn't have information on the case anymore. I'll have to find another way to get my information."

"...how?" the shinigami asked, curious. Light frowned a little bit. He didn't know.

* * *

_9:01AM. December 18, 2003. Kira Task Force Headquarters, Tokyo, Japan._

"What's this?" Yagami asked the three investigators who just put letters on his desk and were standing in front of it, staring at him. One of them was Matsuda, who looked fearful and nervous.

"This is our resignation letter!" Matsuda said. Yagami's eyebrows shot up and his eyes widened, his mouth slightly slacking.

"W-what? Why?!"

"Everyone has noticed it by now, haven't they?" one of the other investigators, dressing smartly in a green suit with his black hair perfectly combed around his head and eternally tired eyes, said. "Kira is a supernatural killer, and Klein and L may talk a lot of shop, but they're not police. They don't have to go out there and investigate; their names aren't tied to the case. L doesn't even have a name." He inhaled deeply, gathered his courage, then said, "I'm doing this because I fear for my life! I would like to be reassigned to another case, but if that cannot be done, we quit this case." Yagami looked too stunned for words. Watari and everyone else watched the exchange in silence.

"But Matsuda... why? You, too?"

"Y- yes, chief." Matsuda seemed to waver, his serious façade dropping an inch, showing how young he really was. Only eight years older than Yagami's own son. "I-I can't. I'm too young. I'm not even married yet, I haven't done anything. Kira can reach all of us. He killed Taylor when Taylor pretended to be L and to be hunting him. It's only a matter of time."

"Why now?!"

"Because we're getting close, chief," said the third man, the one who hadn't spoken yet. He was tall and very muscular, with a strong jaw and fierce eyes. The fearful expression looked out of place on his face. "Because we might actually have to hunt him, and if he finds out... he'll kill us. He'll kill all of us."

"I hope you can understand and forgive us," Matsuda said, and the three of them turned around and left. Yagami realised he had at some point thrown his chair back and was now standing, paralysed in shock. Only Watari noticed, however, the small flicker of the chief's eyes in his direction.


	3. Prowess

_A/N: Once again I want to thank my Betas for all their help. Also, if you like this fic, hate this fic, think it's kinda sorta okay-ish, I'd love to hear all about it in the reviews. I have, once again, edited the past two chapters to correct a few mistakes and make more sense with the characters I'm trying to portray. Not much has changed, the story is mostly the same and just a few details were fixed. Also, I added timestamps to each section where action happens to make it somewhat clearer. With all the back-and-forth in time that happens, it is indeed quite necessary._

_A/N 2: You really, **really** should pay attention to the timestamps. They include location, date, time, etc, and without them this chapter can be quite confusing._

_A/N 3: I'm very sorry for the delay in publication, I've been having problems because stuff and so have my betas, but I plan on being faster with the next chapters. I hope you stick to the story!_

_A/N 4: Just so that the confusion generated by HPMoR's doesn't repeat here, Light's _What_ is not supposed to be a question nor have a quotation mark._

_A/n 5: Review! Reviews make me happy! Good reviews make me proud and bad reviews make me find my flaws and correct them! Good reviews encourage me to continue and bad reviews encourage me to improve! So review!_

* * *

_9:05AM. December 18, 2003. Kira Task Force Headquarters, Tokyo, Japan._

As the three left, Klein looked dumbfounded and everyone else started whispering and talking.

"Are they right? What if he gets us?"

"He can kill anyone, anywhere. He can just find us if we start looking too hard."

"Is this the right thing to do...?"

Yagami slowly sat back on his chair, looking older than he ever had. For the first time Klein looked frightened as Watari stood up and talked. "Ladies and gentlemen. We would not like this position to be forced on you. If you feel threatened or you want to leave, you are free to do so. No one will think less of you, and your honour will remain unsullied." He waited for his words to sink in, and then Yagami continued, looking grim and sad. "Tomorrow we will meet again here at the same time. Anyone who does not wish to continue in this team is free to simply not show up tomorrow. If you do so, I will accept it and, if you are a Japanese officer, I will reassign you to another case. Do not feel pressured to continue working on this." He sighed and closed his eyes. "This meeting is over."

Everyone seemed uneasy at that since they'd all just arrived. But one look at the chief's face was enough to make nobody want to stay there. They'd have a free day, apparently.

* * *

_8:49AM. December 19, 2003. Kira Task Force Headquarters, Tokyo, Japan._

The next day, Yagami Soichiro arrived at the headquarters to find that about a third of the investigators were missing. Matsuda and the other two were amongst them. The room went deathly silent as Yagami walked to his desk and sat on his chair with his eyes closed. He put both elbows on the desk and wrapped his fingers together, a carefully neutral expression on his face. When he opened his eyes, they quickly scanned the faces present and caught a signal from Watari: the man shook his head once.

"We're ready for today's report," Yagami said. Klein was sitting close to Watari, and for the first time she looked scared. However, she still had the steel under her fear.

One of the investigators who had been under Matsuda before he'd left stood up. Her eyes were intense and her brows were furrowed. "There were twenty-two confirmed heart attacks of criminals in the past twenty-four hours. Their information is included in the report." Her lips trembled. Her voice was one shade short of breaking and her hands were clenched into tight fists. "There were three anomalies, however." Everyone sat straighter as she explained. The air became heavy with foreboding, and even Watari looked up from his laptop. If his body language was anything to go by, he was very interested. "Three of the criminals wrote notes right before they died. One of them wasn't even caught. He was a wanted serial arsonist who walked with his hands up into the police headquarters of his city - Veracruz, Mexico - dropped the note, and then had a heart attack in front of the officers."

"What notes?" Yagami asked.

"They were curiously all written in English," said the investigator as she handed the chief copies of their content attached to pictures of their originals, "and in the form of lyric verses." Yagami quickly scanned the messages but chose to study them later. After a few seconds of silence, the investigator continued. "About yesterday's investigations, between this streak of murders and the first death four other criminal heart attacks were recorded."

* * *

_5:13PM. November 28, 2003. Yagami household, Tokyo, Japan._

_The instructions say 6 minutes 40 seconds_, Practical mused. _That's a whole lot of time to write details of death._

_Well, they _do_ give you forty whole seconds just to write cause of death. Maybe they're being cautious about the time it takes someone to write stuff, _Common Sense hypothesised.

_And you can only write the details _after_ you write cause of death, it would seem. But I wonder how much you can mess with the order otherwise? _Practical continued.

_Not only that_, Death said, _but also how much detail we can put into our description_.

Light was drying himself as he thought about that. He was tall for his age, and lean, with the barest hint of muscle definition given to him by his haphazard Aikido training. He had brown eyes and hair, which was always a bit too long and falling in front of his eyes. He seemed not to mind it, though, and other than that it was perfectly combed. He was a very handsome boy even at the awkward age of seventeen, but he never thought about it unless it was to get annoyed by the number of people from school that dropped hints about how much they would _love_ to go out with him.

He left the bathroom, put on some more comfortable clothes and sat again at his desk. He opened the first drawer and looked at the mess he'd made with the stuff he'd ripped off the death note.

* * *

_5:17PM. Test number 1._

Now that he was calmer, he grabbed the page where he'd written his first eight names and looked at it. Otoharada Kurou, no cause of death stated, and Shibumaru Takuo, written in four different ways, all of them followed by the words "Run over by a truck." He turned on the TV and tried to find a news channel that was talking about someone who deserved to die. He found a chase happening in the USA, being followed by the news' helicopter. The criminal - Albert Hanson, 34 - had just robbed a bank and killed two people. Now he was driving a stolen car, trying to flee. It was hopeless, of course.

Now that was a potential victim, but that didn't automatically mean he deserved to die. He might've been spooked, he might've killed those people in self-defence. So Light looked the man up online. It wasn't hard to find the news cover of the whole affair: he'd had a partner who would be the driver. Inside the bank, he shot one of the workers there even after the money had been taken; and when they were surrounded, he took one person as a hostage to go to his car, and as soon as he got there he shot the person instead of letting them go. His partner was killed during a shooting at the beginning of the chase, and now he was alone. This was clearly a man who deserved to die.

Light's first test was to see whether the sheet that wasn't attached to the death note anymore had any power. He wrote the man's name, thinking about his face, and followed it with "blood loss." Now he had a few minutes to think up details. He decided he would try to also test his creativity and kill two birds with one stone. Worst-case scenario, that unattached sheet would have lost its power and he'd kill that man later. A fleeting, horrifying thought crossed his mind that maybe the death note would be useless after he ripped off the cover and the instructions sheet, but it was quickly overridden by his Practical side: he'd already ripped it off and it wouldn't affect his tests. If they ended up not working, well...

He started writing. The man would try to make a dangerous manoeuvre which wouldn't work and his car would hit a tree. Then he'd leave it and try to run, heedless of oncoming traffic. The cops chasing him would miss every shot except for one, which would hit his femoral artery just as he crossed to the other side of the highway. There, a biker would hit him and that would break a few of his bones and he'd fall. But he was already bleeding out, and he'd eventually die before medical attention could get to him. That took three minutes to write. Light wondered if he should add any more details, but decided that was good enough. He waited and watched.

On TV, suddenly the car being chased attempted a bootleg turn and failed miserably.

_It's showtime_.

The car turned only 120 degrees and hit a tree just off the highway, having its right front door crushed and halting. Hanson quickly scrambled off and ran as the police officers started shooting in his direction. While he did that, somehow, miraculously, one of the bullets hit his right leg. That made him trip and fall right in front of a biker who ran over him and fell off his bike. The criminal was lying on the floor, bleeding, and screaming for help. The police cars surrounded him, but eventually he bled out.

Success.

_So the pages work independently. It's a property of them, not of the notebook itself. The notebook is made of death pages, in other words, it's not the pages that are bound to a death notebook, _Death said poetically, and snickered.

_There was also a good deal of fine control over the scene, and yet somehow the notebook managed to make it all happen. This isn't just some toy, this has the power of a god_, Practical replied.

Light's stomach churned again as his mind debated. One part of him screamed that this was _wrong_. The others observed that the man had murdered two people in cold blood and was running away in high speed, endangering many other civilians. The death note was also quite precise: the biker who hit the criminal didn't even get too injured; only the criminal died, and no one else.

He was worryingly becoming thirsty for more.

_We controlled that man's actions quite finely indeed_, Practical continued.

_I wonder exactly how much control we can exert._

* * *

_5:26PM. Test number 2._

Maurice Skäld was being tried for mugging a couple, locking them in their own car and setting the car on fire. He was pleading guilty. That was all Light needed. He had a hard time finding the criminal's face online, but eventually he did, and wrote down his name. The cause of death would be simply a heart attack, so he wrote that. After he wrote it, he could be free with his creativity again. The man was going to find the nearest justice officer, start cawing like a chicken, scream that he was turning into a cat, and then die.

_Why, exactly, are we doing this?_ Common Sense asked.

_We want to know how much control we can have, right?_ Practical explained. _So we need to find out exactly how much people can do before they die because of this death note._

* * *

_5:30PM. Test number 3._

An Indian man threw acid on his daughter's face for refusing to marry the man he'd arranged for her. Light decided he'd fall to his death from the top of the Eiffel Tower in twenty minutes.

* * *

_5:33PM. Test number 4._

A Chinese woman locked her children up in a basement when they disobeyed her. One of her children died because of that. She was under arrest, so she'd stab herself with the nearest pointy object and draw a pentagram (which Light drew on the page) on a wall with her blood. She'd die of blood loss.

* * *

_5:37PM. Test number 5._

A Nigerian serial rapist, currently under arrest, would die of a heart attack after drawing M. C. Escher's Belvedere using chalk.

* * *

_5:45PM. Test number 6._

A French man who killed two people right after mugging them would die at 2AM the next day. Light didn't specify cause of death for this one.

* * *

_5:50PM. Test number 7._

A Brazilian mob boss, currently arrested but suspected of controlling the organised crime from behind bars, would die of a heart attack at 2AM, too.

* * *

_5:54PM._

_Are you satisfied with your testing?_ asked Common Sense.

_Yes, quite_, replied Death giddily.

* * *

_4:20PM. November 29, 2003._

When Light arrived home the next day, he looked up those people whose names he'd written on the death note. Tests 2, 4 and 7 worked as he'd written them; tests 3 and 5 died of simple heart attacks; test 6 died 40 seconds after he'd written his name on the previous day.

_What can we conclude from the data?_ Practical asked.

_We have a good deal of control over the deaths_, Death said. _We can control not only the circumstances of the death but also the actions of people surrounding the death so that it happens exactly as we want. However, it has to be within a reasonable limit of realism. Anything outright impossible such as climbing the Eiffel Tower or drawing something you've never seen is forbidden. However, other than that... it seems we can do pretty much anything._ _We could control anyone evil we wanted! We could-_

_Now, hold on a minute, there_, Moral said. _We're supposed to only kill those who deserve to die, and not do anything else. We mustn't make anyone suffer or toy with them._

_Yes_, Practical agreed. Light had a distinct impression of someone nodding inside his head, and that really made him question his own sanity and how independent these parts of himself were. _Besides, we're being too careless. We need a way of killing those people that won't show who or where we are. I'm sure no one will really look at these weird deaths these past two days, but on the off-chance that they do, we need to start being much more careful._

* * *

_9:22AM. December 19, 2003. Kira Task Force Headquarters, Tokyo, Japan._

"Of these four heart attacks," the investigator continued after explaining the detected heart attacks, "three happened after four P.M. on a weekday, just like Otoharada on the previous day. One of them happened on the next day, during the morning, and on that same day the first of the hourly murders was detected, starting at five P.M. That is all."

"I see," Yagami said. "Thank you for your report."

"Yagami-sama," said Watari, and the chief looked at him. "L would like to be sent a copy of the three notes left by the dying men."

"I would, too," Klein said.

"These notes are on file," the investigator who delivered the report said. "And in the report. They can be sent electronically immediately."

"Splendid," Klein interjected, and now she looked less scared, her face having acquired more colour and her voice firm as before.

* * *

_"He walked down the_

_eerie, scary, strange,_

_lonely, silent, empty,_

_lovely, beautiful, shiny,_

_ominous, dark, foreboding_

_lane of the road of death."_

* * *

_"Who are you?_

_asked the little boy._

_No one, really,_

_the dark, tall man replied._

_Then, all of a sudden,_

_out of the blue, really, the crow appeared."_

* * *

_"Please, don't hurt me._

_Lovely boy, why would I hurt you?_

_Ah, lovely boy, no,_

_you are special, you are._

_And we'll have so much fun together!"_

* * *

_9:30AM._

_This is sick_, Yagami thought as he read the three notes. _Why would they write these notes?_

"Chief," Watari called and Yagami looked up from the notes he'd been examining. Everyone in the headquarters was busy cross-referencing, trying to find patterns, the usual stuff. Klein had an abstracted look on her face, lost in deep thought, probably trying to extract some meaning from the cryptic message. "Have you found anything?"

"No," he replied. "Except..." Some of the investigators stopped what they were doing to hear Yagami speak. "These seem to form a coherent whole. But the sources... they couldn't have contacted each other. They lived in very different parts of the world. And they don't seem to be saying anything at all!" He put his face on his hands, exhausted.

_Unless..._

"Yagami-sama," Watari called, and the chief looked at him. "L believes the message in these notes isn't in the text itself."

"What, you mean like a riddle?" Yagami replied. "We already have men working on that."

"No. L believes Kira may be able to control his victims before they die." Everyone's shoulders slumped when they heard that. People had been working under that unspoken assumption, of course, but to have it out in the open, spoken aloud, that was different. The glum mood was so thick you could cut it with a knife, and the faint buzzing of whispers intensified a little bit. "These messages weren't sent by the victims. They were sent by Kira himself."

"Yes, I thought so, too," said the chief while everyone else seemed to go back to their work. "Still-"

"Chief, there was another note!" one of the members of the watch team said. "Look."

* * *

_"Going forth, going back,_

_always going, never stopping!_

_Moving on, moving off,_

_eternally walking!"_

* * *

_9:34AM._

Yagami read the new note. He then gathered all notes and read them over again, trying to find the connection. The fourth one simply didn't seem to fit.

"We got something," one of the members of the cryptanalysis team said.

"Let's hear it," Yagami replied.

"Just, the first letter of each line," the investigator sounded almost apologetic. Sure, they'd been analysing those messages for only twenty minutes, but it was still pretty obvious and should've been noticed before.

_That one's staying on the team_, L thought about the investigator as he watched the scene through the webcam.

"H-e-l-l-o-l-W-a-N-t-T-o-P-L-A-y-A-G-a-M-e. 'Hello, L. Want to play a game?'" He raised his head from the papers to look at Watari. The cloaked man only looked at the chief for a few seconds then started typing, seemingly ignoring what had just happened.

* * *

_4:42PM. December 18, 2003. Yagami household, Tokyo, Japan._

"I'm just messing with them," Light explained to Ryuk. "First you create a message, then you find a way to convey that message, and then you watch as they start to find an infinity of hidden meanings in it." He smiled and raised his index finger. "There _are_ no meanings. This is an empty threat."

"I see..." Ryuk said. "But why are you messing with them? Why do that at all?"

"Well, if they're smart they're trying to profile me based on my patterns. Which is part of the reason why I'm trying to leave none. Most serial killers are male, so they probably think that's true of me. They're also generally uneducated, methodical, bored of life and sexually deviant. Now, I'm not really methodical for method's sake." He shook his head. "My M.O. wasn't picked out of any deep sense or unseated desire. I just want to make it as hard as possible to be caught, ideally altogether impossible."

"And... that explains your message how...?" The shinigami was upside down again, eating his apple.

"I'm just trying to mess with their psychological profiling. Maybe they'll start thinking that I have a very competitive nature and that I think of this as a game against L and the police. Whatever conclusion they draw, it won't be the simple 'Kira is messing with us' one, and so I'll invariably make their model of me less accurate. I'm giving them evidence that has _negative_ correlation with the actual reason I sent them that evidence, thus making myself harder to find. Basically, I just created noise." His lips curled up. "But it's also really a threat. I want them to know I can control the people I kill before they die. I want them to be afraid. Fearful people are more careless. I might even try to pick dad's mind when he comes back from work."

* * *

_8:57PM. December 19, 2003. A dark room with a bright monitor somewhere._

With all the information thus far collected, it was finally time to think. He couldn't postpone proposing solutions any longer.

So L thought.

* * *

_9:00AM. December 20, 2003. Kira Task Force Headquarters, Tokyo, Japan._

Watari walked into the room, sat at his usual desk, turned on his laptop and started streaming the image to L, who waited anxiously. When the anonymous investigator saw the image showing up on his screen, he was a bit disheartened. He had imagined some people would have left because of the news that Kira could control his victims but as far as he could see not a lot of them had.

_No, that's a good thing. It means they're stronger than you previously thought. Maybe they're not so completely hopeless as you expected them to be, _he thought.

_How often have our intuitive models of people been wrong in the past? _another part of him asked.

"Report?" Yagami asked as he walked in, and the report started. There was no news, no more notes, just the usual 20-something reported deaths, plus some gaps from the past few days being covered by previously unrecognised deaths. Once it was over, the regular movement resumed. From L's vantage point, that was the main problem. There were a lot of people there, yes - L estimated between 100 and 150 officers from all countries involved with the Interpol - but there was too much idle going, too many people who were being suboptimally used.

"Watari, turn on voice relay." Watari did as instructed, turned his laptop around and showed everyone who happened to be looking in that direction a white background with the letter L in Cloister Black. The webcam rotated so that it was facing the right way again, and the electronically distorted voice could be heard in the headquarters. "Officers of the Kira investigation case," L started in English, "we will need a shift in our investigation in light of yesterday's details. Chief, I will need you to help these people organise into a few groups."

* * *

_6:08PM. Yagami household, Tokyo, Japan._

"I'm home!" the tired voice of Yagami Soichiro could be heard. The chief removed his shoes and walked in. The mouth-watering smell of food was the first pleasant sensory input he'd had since he'd left his house the previous morning - he'd spent two days at the office - and he could quite literally hear his stomach grumbling. He walked to the kitchen to find Sachiko and Sayu already there.

"Light, your father's home!" Soichiro's wife called out, beaming.

"I'm coming!" The chief sat and waited patiently for her to serve them all. Just as she was about to shout again, Light walked through the kitchen's door. "Hello dad," he greeted his father from a distance and sat on the table. He'd never been very fond of displays of affection.

"Hi" was the tired reply Light got.

"How are you?"

"Tired," answered the officer simply. They started eating in silence. Even Sayu looked a bit subdued by Soichiro's apparent sullen mood. Light wondered whether his notes had caused that, and dared ask after a while.

"You don't look so good. Is the Kira case going slow?" Tentative, innocent, curious, childish. He managed to impart all those adjectives into his words.

"Oh, no... That bastard's messing with us, but he's being sloppy and L is a very good investigator." He sighed. "And so... we're a bit overworked now." He shook his head and frowned, sounding a bit frustrated. "Sorry. I can't talk about it. It's very stressing not to, but it's confidential. I shouldn't even have mentioned L."

_What_ was the single-word-sentence that crossed Light's mind when he heard that.

* * *

_6:49PM._

_What?! Sloppy?!_

As soon as they finished eating, Light excused himself, mentioning studying, and went to his bedroom in an internal panic. Ryuk, as always, followed the boy on his heels, chuckling as he always did. "Kukuku..."

_Let's calm down, we can't actually think if we're in this panic_, suggested Practical.

_He's right. We need to objectively assess how sloppy we've actually been and then figure out what to do in order to control the damage_, agreed Common Sense.

Death grudgingly accepted, and Light started taking long, even breaths.

_What have we actually done that was very Sloppy?_ Practical started.

_We killed Taylor_, Cautious piped up. _There was also that guy from TV, Otoharada whatshisface..._

_We need to work under the assumption that L knows we're Japanese_, Common Sense said. _What _else_ could he know?_

* * *

_8:58PM. December 19, 2003. A dark room with a bright monitor somewhere._

L thought, thought and thought. It was, in fact, his favourite sport. He needed to gauge his uncertainties, and it was about time, too.

_I should be working under the assumption that Kira is Japanese_, he started. He knew humans tended to be severely overconfident. He also knew about overcorrection, though, and so when it came to putting numbers into his uncertainty he'd actually spent the past few years honing his intuition. _Otoharada Kurou died during a Live TV news report on a Japanese news channel. Any information about him before that was very hard to find, even with our monitoring ability. Kira also killed Taylor first, which was just our verification procedure. Yes, I'd say we're 95% certain Kira is Japanese_, analysed Intuition. _Or he's playing on a level so meta we'd have to rework our strategies completely. I don't think we have evidence to suggest that, however._

_Most statistics say that the probability that a given serial killer is male ranges between 92% and 95%, and our personal experience agrees with that data. Do we have any evidence that would change that?_ Questioner asked.

_I don't think we can actually gauge the killer's gender. We should go with maximum entropy and just assume that the statistical data is reliable. But let's be conservative. The probability that he's male is 92%._ That was yet another voice, the one he called Thinker.

_What about his age?_ asked Questioner.

_According to most statistics, there's a 28% probability that he's between 26 and 31 and a 57% probability that he's between 18 and 36_, Thinker answered.

_But I feel we _do_ have evidence that he's younger than the average serial killer_, Intuition proposed. _For one, he's highly idealistic. He wants to purge all evil from the world, apparently. He's very careful to kill people who were purposeful in their actions. Also, there's the time of day his schedule resets, which suggests..._

_It suggests nothing yet, we're not ready to integrate that information into our model_, interrupted Thinker. _However, I do agree that he's probably younger than our average serial killer. We'll probably have to include teenagers now._

_Not _too_ young, though_, continued Intuition, _otherwise they wouldn't have the necessary cognitive skills to have this much control over the deaths, not to mention emotional control._

_He's much smarter than your average serial killer, too. Since he's Japanese, he's very likely educated._

_You're purposefully missing our main piece of evidence... _Questioner pointed out.

_Indeed_, Thinker conceded. _But we're getting to it just now. Do we have _any_ other information? Let's review everything we _do_ have._

_His first killing was Otoharada Kurou, his subsequent killings before the spree started all happened after 4PM. Taylor himself only died on the next day after 5PM, so he probably had already set the schedule and couldn't change it._

_Alright,_ Questioner gathered, _with all of this I guess we can finally ask. He's a young idealistic intelligent educated Japanese male who has availability to kill after 4PM. Who's he?_

* * *

_7:21PM. December 20, 2003. Yagami household, Tokyo, Japan._

_Fuck _was the single word Light thought after he'd worked out exactly how sloppy he'd been.

* * *

_9:09AM. Kira Task Force Headquarters, Tokyo, Japan._

"I want 5% of you working on cryptanalysis to decode any messages Kira might send; 15% should keep looking for patterns in the deaths that might give us renewed information about the profile. These 20% are the ones that will tell us the shape of the remaining 80%. Yagami-sama, the remaining 80% are the ones that are actually going to start investigating people and will be headed by yourself. After the groups have been decided, these 80% should come talk to me again so that we can continue our plans. We have been too long gathering information; it's time to move a little bit. We have what we need. We're going to catch this criminal. It's time to act."

Almost everyone spent two seconds in stunned silence. L very rarely spoke directly to them - he knew there were patterns that could be used to identify traits of the speaker if you heard them talk directly -, so hearing a whole speech like that left them dumbfounded. But those _were_ the more invested of the officers (or some of them were anyway), so as soon as they recovered, Yagami was shouting orders and calling people and asking for opinions.

The whole process took two hours, and then the three groups were ready. When they were, Yagami sat back on his desk and looked at Watari, who had since turned the laptop back to himself and was using it. The mysterious cloaked man noticed and turned the laptop again. "Yagami-sama, you will further divide this third group. We will assume Kira is Japanese, so waste no police time on non-Japanese until and unless we have evidence that points otherwise. Klein-san, please take it from here."

The woman, who had been silent since they convened, spoke up. "I believe there is a 90% chance that this killer is a male, and this is a conservative estimate. He's probably young, between 15 and 30 years old." There were murmurs at that. "Yes, I have started considering that he may be a teenager. This sort of idealism and enthusiasm is atypical of older people. Finally, he must be in some kind of schedule that makes it likely that he's unobserved - ideally at home - after 4P.M. on weekdays. So what's our target group?"

Yagami realised at the same time one of the investigators opened her eyes wide and said, "A student?"

"Precisely," Klein said. "Our killer is most likely a male student, high-achieving and intelligent. Now, we can't put everyone on that, because there are still too many loose variables."

"So of this group, 75% will be in charge of investigating that specific group. We need to start somewhere, so we'll start by finding the best students in Japan. The other 25% will concentrate on other groups, as you see fit. Feel free to consult Klein about her profile," said the distorted voice that was L.

"But, um, L-sama," one tiny-looking investigator asked. Everyone looked at her, and she seemed to shrink into herself. L had noticed her before, however. She was one of the quick ones, and even though she didn't speak much, she always seemed to not fall into the so common shock that every piece of news in this case seemed to cause in everyone else. "There are more than 127 million Japanese people. How many of those are students?"

"Over 4 million," Klein answered immediately. The small investigator looked as if someone had hit her.

"Where should we start looking?"

Klein was about to answer when L said, "You have already figured that out."

"...yes," she said timidly, after a while. She looked like she might just explode.

Yagami looked bewildered between the both of them, until he finally asked, "Well?"

When neither L nor Klein answered, the timid investigator said, "We should start with the top students of the most densely populated region in Japan." Yagami twitched almost imperceptibly at that, but L caught it and made a mental note to investigate.

"Right," L continued. "And that is, by far, Kanto. Which just happens to be around us. Yagami-sama, it would be best if the teams separated physically according to their function so that investigators that are part of the same team could have quick access to each other. We should maybe find more headquarters."

"...I'll look into it," answered Yagami Soichiro. Then L went silent, and Watari turned his computer to himself again.

* * *

_7:23PM. Yagami household, Tokyo, Japan._

_Right_, Practical immediately started. Or... well, immediately after the sheer surprise of Light's glaring stupidity was fought and destroyed. _We've been very sloppy. We should assume the worst: the police knows for a fact that Kira is a young student, high school or maybe college, and a very smart one at that._

_Don't you think we may be flattering ourselves by thinking we're smart?_ asked Common Sense. _I mean, if we let on this much, I'm not sure we actually deserve that adjective..._

There was a wordless grunt from Death, and Cautious seemed to be emanating a sort of I-told-you-so aura.

_Be as it may, we have revealed way too much, even taking into account the message we "sent" to make noise. Being pessimistic, they probably know we're a high school male student, probably high achieving,_ Practical continued. _We need to make more noise and be more careful._

_What could we be doing differently?_ asked Common Sense again. _We need to review everything_.

Ryuk watched Light's many facial expression changes from the bed, content with his apple. He didn't seem to mind waiting until the boy explained what was going on in his head, and indeed patience paid off.

"I have noticed a curious thing about the death note," Light told Ryuk as he opened his nondescript white notebook. Ryuk floated over to look at it. Light opened it and pointed to the left margin of the note. "I have removed a few pages from the notebook. Actually a lot of them. At first, it shows. But after a while," and he showed the place where there should be some remnant of the removed page. It looked as if only one page had been removed since he'd started using it.

"Ah- yes, the death note is infinite," Ryuk said. "You can just keep filling it and it will never end." _Never end? Now there's an unexpected blessing,_ Light thought. He'd been trying to think of plans on how to obtain a new notebook once his ran out, but apparently that wouldn't happen. How lucky.

_Alright. So, about the death note itself, is there anything we should be doing differently?_ Practical mused. They looked at the page and all that could be seen was that someone had worked really hard to make something impossible to read. It had worked, certainly. _We remove the pages once they're filled..._

"Ryuk, what would happen if I wrote someone's death and immediately ripped the page off and burned it?"

"Once a name is written on a death note that person will die. No matter what happens to the death note, to the person who wrote the name or to the shinigami who owns it, that death will happen."

Light smiled the smile that creeped Ryuk out. _Such a creepy child..._

_So we can improve that: remove pages as soon as we're done writing the day's deaths. It's unnecessary to save space since the death note is infinite. What else?_ continued Practical.

_We're not... _actually_ being smart about our computer. There are too many ways this could go wrong. We should stop using a permanent-state OS to do our research._

Practical concurred. _Agreed. And... let's be quite honest here. Our password-protected idea is good but there's no reason whatsoever to keep those files in our computer. We'll get that encrypted flash drive and make it so the list is destroyed if someone gets the password wrong._

_Ah, but that has its own failure modes. If someone _does_ get their hands on our flash drive and destroys all the information there and all the deaths suddenly stop, well... that could be _bad_. No, I mean, that _will _be bad,_ this time it was Cautious who spoke, for the first time in a while. It was good to know his internal voices were starting to agree.

_Right. Then, maybe two different drives with two different passwords and kept in two different places...?_ Practical suggested.

_There's no reason to limit ourselves. It's better to err on the side of caution. I suggest three_, replied Cautious.

_But will we keep a copy of the document on each of the drives or will we have three different documents with different people?_ asked Common Sense. They thought of losing targets because of the loss of one of the flash drives. No, that could not do.

_Besides_, continued Practical, _if they found even one of those documents we'd be doomed anyway. We wouldn't probably be any less doomed if we separated the documents._

_Well, maybe we would, in fact, _argued Common Sense, _but I'm pretty sure the gain is negligible._

_No permanent-state OS, information kept on three different, physically separated, encrypted and password-protected drives. What else?_ urged Death.

_No longer react to taunts. No longer taunt them at all. No longer try to communicate with them. No longer give _any_ evidence of who we are_, Cautious replied.

_But now they have enough evidence to actually start investigating us_, Death said.

_That's true_, began Common Sense, _but we can't do much about that, not for now anyway. Damn it, there has to be a way to infiltrate their headquarters and find out what they're doing..._


	4. Brute Force

_A/N: To those who are worried, this is _not_ going to be a rewrite of the original story with a smarter L and Light. But this is only the fourth chapter, the consequences of their differing actions are only starting to show up now._

* * *

_9:00AM. December 22, 2003. Kira Taskforce Team Gamma Headquarters, Tokyo, Japan._

"Good morning, Team Gamma," L's voice was heard through the laptop speakers. The conversations stopped and the team looked at Watari. They had spent most of the previous day organising and arranging their new headquarters. Team Gamma, the largest one, kept the old quarters, and the other two were moved to smaller rooms. The layout had changed a little bit, however. Now there were two desks in evidence, one dedicated to Watari, who no longer sat at the back. "It is time to start our investigations. We will no longer be reading the daily report of Kira's murders; if any new information is obtained, the other two teams will inform us. Now it is time to act. We need to discuss what we know and figure out the best strategy. Klein-sama."

The woman stood up. "Based on our profile, it is likely that our killer is a bright young male student. That is our best guess, and we have to start somewhere. 30% of the team should focus on male High School students, 60% on bright University students, and the remaining 10% will investigate anyone who has brought any attention to themselves because of intellectual prowess in the past five years. Give more attention to the male suspects, but do not ignore the female ones."

"Are we sure this person is intellectually high-achieving?" asked an investigator - the tiny-looking one L had noticed before. She had short mousy hair and black eyes, and everything about her looked incredibly fragile and delicate. She was the kind of person you instinctively felt like protecting, like she could break if the world threw anything at her.

"As Klein-sama said, we have to start somewhere," answered L's voice. "The attitudes of the killer seem highly self-confident and the fact that he sent us a message imply that he may even be cocky. Coupling that with his strategy of randomness, which is simple but not obvious without hindsight, we should be looking at someone who doesn't think they'll be caught and who trusts their own intellect highly. I do not believe the killer will give us any more significant bits of evidence without our actions, and since we're _still_ collecting data even as we investigate, this is the best allocation of resources we could have."

"We are going to start compiling a database," Yagami started, "within the constraints given by L. We are going to start with a brute-force search: investigate each person from the list, starting at the top, for suspicious activity. We cannot spend too much time on everyone, just enough to have a more limited set."

"I am recruiting more international help," L said after it was clear Yagami was done, "including from agencies such as the FBI. They will be contacting you shortly to coordinate and optimise. Let's get started."

Later that day, Yagami looked at a list with the first 300 names of the best High School students in Kanto. Watari, under L's instructions, surreptitiously turned the webcam to the Chief's face, so L saw the look of dismay that crossed the old man's face.

* * *

_4:13PM. December 25, 2003. The streets of Tokyo, Japan._

"Light," Ryuk said suddenly.

"I told you not to talk to me in public," Light answered under his breath without looking at the floating clown.

"I know. But there's something I need to tell you about that." Light didn't show any reaction, so Ryuk kept talking. "You know I'm not on your or L's side. I'm sticking with you because it's the rules, and also because you're very interesting. I don't think I've ever seen a human quite like you, and in some ways you're a better shinigami than all I've met." Light suppressed a smile. _Tell me something I don't know_, he thought. "So to preserve my source of fun it'd be better if you didn't die too soon." Now he hid a frown. _What?_ "Which is why I'm telling you that someone's following you. They've been at it for two days."

_They know. They know, they know, they know_, Death started moaning.

_Shut up. They don't. There is simply _no way_ we left enough evidence for them to pin _us_ down_, Common Sense reasoned.

_Then how do you explain this?!_ yelled Death.

_Motion to have Death removed_, suggested Cautious. _He's too dumb to be a part of us._ The others were a bit uneasy but ignored Cautious' advice. _They're brute-forcing_, he concluded. _Last week we reasoned that in the worst case scenario they know we're a good High School student. There are at least a few hundred thousand of those in Japan, probably a few million. What would you expect? They're probably going through a list of Japan's top students, and we're at the top of _that_ list._

_One has to remember that being a good student doesn't automatically imply being a smart student. _We_ just happen to be both, but we _have_ talked to the other good students and... well..._ Common Sense explained. _Anyway, being smart makes it more likely that you're a good student ceteris paribus, so being a good student is evidence that you're smart. They probably have nowhere to start, so they're starting with grades and other types of academic achievement._

That seemed to calm Death down considerably, but Practical started thinking at top speed. _What do we do? What's our plan?_

_I predict this person will stop following us soon. We're leaving no evidence of our alternate identity. All we have to do is behave normally and this person will move on_, Common Sense explained.

_Are you _sure_ of that? We have made too many mistakes already. We can't afford to make more_, worried Practical.

_Well... if Ryuk had told us about this person earlier, we could've been more cautious..._ Common Sense started.

_No. We're not being cautious _enough_ as it is_, Cautious warned._ We _are_ leaving evidence. Like it or not, we are very methodical, we're always home by 4:30PM, we barely ever go out with anyone-_

_We're soon taking the university entrance exams,_ Common Sense carefully explained. _It's only natural that we spend a lot of time home now. We _are_ the top student of this country, after all, and if we didn't study it'd be even more suspicious..._ he drifted.

_How sure are you of your observations? Also, that is beyond the point. They are working under the hypothesis that we update our schedule every day between 4 and 5PM. If we manage to show that our schedule was still updated at that time but we weren't home, that is _significant_ evidence against the hypothesis. We need to provide them with that evidence _tomorrow, Cautious said. The others, after some more debating, agreed. _Tomorrow is a Friday. So, here's what we're going to do..._

* * *

_4:05PM. December 26, 2003. Somewhere in Tokyo, Japan._

_Subject seems to be deviating from his pattern_, the tiny investigator wrote on a tiny notepad. She had been only collecting data and trying to hold judgment, as L had instructed, so she didn't pay attention to the ideas forming in the back of her mind. _Subject is surrounded by friends, seems to be socialising. They are not heading towards subject's house._ She followed them, trying to stay inconspicuous.

The group went to a karaoke bar, and the investigator waited ten minutes outside before going in. The group had picked a large table - they were 9 people in total - and no one had mustered up the courage to sing yet. She kept taking notes, and no one seemed to notice her. After a while, Light and a girl who was blushing furiously got up and they sang together, being soon followed by the rest of the group.

They left the bar at around 8:45PM and went each to their respective houses. Light accompanied one of the girls - the same who'd sung the first song with him - to her house, and then returned to his. The investigator wrote down the exact time Light arrived home as 9:07PM. She kept outside until all the lights of the Yagami household had been off for two hours and then returned to the HQ.

* * *

_9:01AM. December 27, 2003. __Kira Taskforce Team Gamma Headquarters, Tokyo, Japan._

"I would like to receive the first batch of reports on the investigated," said Yagami to his group of investigators when they were all settled. They had each spent four days tailing the top 130 suspects. The remaining 32 investigators were continuing to compile the database and integrating the data collected into it.

Yagami received the files with the data thus far collected and quickly scanned the list. His eyes stopped at his son's name, besides which he could find the category "Low to moderate suspicion." He double clicked it and looked at all the notes taken by the investigator in charge.

They described Light's day-to-day routine with a few details that frightened the chief in their precision. _Most of the social interest seems feigned. Constantly bored. Methodical in his schedule._ At the end were the investigator's impressions. As L had instructed, after collecting the data and not thinking of conclusions, the investigators were supposed to finally say something.

_Subject fits the psychological profile of the killer. His strict and detached manner suggest constant high-level reasoning. Research into subject's academic achievements and student life show great range of abilities even amongst peers. One should be reminded, nevertheless, that a student who spends as much time as subject does studying is less likely to be Kira. Additionally, last day of investigations concluded with strong evidence against being Kira: subject spent a good deal of the night with friends, without access to any means of communication nor apparent tool for murder, and during that time the murders continued as usual, including two of people whose crimes were announced on that same day. Barring improbable scenarios where subject needs access to no tools whatsoever to realise the murders, the only competitor to the innocence hypothesis is crafty cleverness and having detected the ongoing investigation. The apparently anomalous social gathering with friends at the end of the investigation is medium evidence in favour of such detection; the training and caution of this investigator is weak evidence against it. Subject showed no change in behaviour that suggested that, which is further weak evidence against the hypothesis. However, it is the personal opinion of this investigator that this is well within the intellectual capabilities of the subject. Such musings notwithstanding, the prior was very low and the evidence not good enough to raise the posterior to significance. This investigator suggests that priority is to be given to the subject only in the event of the elimination of most other possible suspects._

Yagami read the whole thing twice, frowning with concentration. The rest of the report seemed to be spotless and airtight. He sighed in resignation. Everything the investigator had said was, after all, true, and he knew his son's intellectual abilities enough to agree. But those weren't everything. Light would _never_ do that. He was the son of a police officer, brought up to uphold the law and respect human life. He would never descend to such depths.

Would he?

* * *

_6:02PM. December 25, 2003. Yagami household, Tokyo, Japan._

"What are you planning to do, Light?" asked the Shinigami, who seemed to take joy in watching the wheels turning inside the boy's head.

"I'm going to fool this investigator into thinking I'm not Kira. Isn't that obvious?"

"How?" Ryuk was already used to the occasional contempt Light seemed to show him. It was pretty much how Light treated most people.

"Well, I'm... I'd like to have your help, actually."

"Light, I told you, I'm neutral-"

"Neutral, yes, I know," interrupted the boy. "Which is why you're going to help me. See, the way things are right now, the game isn't really balanced. L has access to the Interpol and agents from all over the world, the best computer surveillance and who knows what else. Me? I'm just a High School student. And I'm not going to ask you much. I just want you to stick by the investigator tomorrow, from the moment I leave school to the moment they stop tailing me, and read her notes. Also, I'm going to bring you three extra apples per day for the next three weeks if you help me," he added his trump cards nonchalantly.

"Three... every day?!" Light had the distinct impression that Ryuk's mouth was watering even though he was pretty sure Ryuk didn't have saliva in his mouth. "Okay. I'll do it. But you know, there's something else I can do for you..."

"Oh?" He sat up straighter. New resources were always a good thing.

"Shinigami can see the names and lifespans of humans just by looking at them. We know exactly the date and time of death of anyone we want, because when we kill humans, we add their otherwise remaining lifespan to ours, so it's good to know how much we're adding. And we can make a pact with the human that currently holds a death note." _Pact. Not good_, Light thought. "You can trade half your remaining lifespan for the eyes of the Shinigami: the ability to see exactly what we see."

Light thought about that for three seconds and asked, "If I do that, will I get the lifespan of the people I kill?"

"No, only Shinigami get that-"

"Then not a chance," Light interrupted.

"Are you-"

"Yes. If I ever feel like a failure has a greater disutility than losing half my life and I can prevent it with your aid I'll get it, but right now that is definitely not the case. No, I'm confident in my plan."

"What is it?"

"It's simple. It won't guarantee a success, but it'll definitely throw them off my scent. I'm going to use the school's computers twice tomorrow - since the investigator can't get into the school, they won't know it, and I'll use two different students' credentials to log into the system pretending I forgot mine - and I'll get information about two murders that I'll execute while I'm with a group of friends somewhere. I have an advantage here in that they don't know how I kill people. Even if they assume it's supernatural in origin, which they likely do, something as simple as writing a name on a piece of paper ought to be _forbidden_ - that's how human beings think, even smart ones. It's what _I_ would think if I were in L's shoes. I think. Anyway, it's all I can do right now. You could've warned me earlier."

"Eh. Sorry, Light." If he'd known Light would offer so many apples he certainly _would_ have warned the boy earlier.

* * *

_11:11AM. December 27, 2003. __Kira Taskforce Team Gamma Headquarters, Tokyo, Japan._

"The FBI has arrived in Japan," Watari announced suddenly. "They have sent 35 agents. We have word from other agencies around the world. They will be here shortly. We should have at least 300 more people arriving by the end of the week. Some of them will help the other two teams, but the majority will help you brute-force our database. There are a few million people to go through. This is _not_ going to be an easy or fast project, but it's by no means impossible. We already have a list of potential suspects based on your work so far."

* * *

_11:12AM. A dark room with a bright monitor somewhere._

L watched everything, as usual, through his computer, and sighed. They still had much, much work to do. And many people would die in the meantime. Thousands of them.

And was it really that bad? He kept questioning and second-guessing himself, and that wasn't usual. Even for the sake of solving the puzzle and catching him, was Kira truly evil? Not to use this overused word that didn't even reflect a real concept, but what were the consequences of it? If you killed people who didn't repent, vicious criminals. People who aren't good for society, not for anyone but themselves.

He smacked himself on the forehead. No, that sort of thinking was stupid. First, it was ironic, wasn't it, murdering murderers? What made you different? _What makes _you_ different, Kira? How do you motivate yourself?_

Fundamentally, L thought, Kira was vain. Arrogant. He truly, really thought he knew what was best. That kind of invincibility, of childish thinking, that was characteristic of someone who believed himself right and righteous. Maybe not in those terms, but Kira did believe his brain. That, hopefully, would be his downfall.

Kira was human. That much was obvious. And even if he was a smart human, he was still corruptible - and apparently corrupted. He would slip again. Someone who really trusted his own architecture so much, who really believed his merely human brain was capable of actually measuring the worth of someone's life, that person wasn't a person who could win. For the good of the tribe you shouldn't take power even for the good of the tribe. For the good of the tribe you shouldn't kill someone even for the good of the tribe.

_I will catch you, Kira. You will slip up again. They always do._

* * *

_9:02PM. Just outside the __Kira Taskforce Team Gamma Headquarters,__ Tokyo, Japan._

"Watari," Yagami greeted the cloaked man as he left the HQ.

"Yagami-sama," acknowledged the mysterious figure. "L would like to speak."

"Of course." The chief didn't invite him to follow, he just walked to the lift and was followed. Once he arrived at his old office, he sat, and gestured for Watari to do the same. "Yes?"

"Is anything bothering you, Yagami-sama?" the electronic voice came from Watari's cloak.

_Interesting_, Yagami noted. _So he doesn't need his laptop to be present_. "We're hunting an international serial killer. How could it not be bothering me?"

"I mean more specifically," explained L. "You seem troubled by the idea that a High School student could be Kira."

The chief regarded the cloaked man coolly. "You know exactly what I'm feeling, L," he said, sounding somewhat dry.

"Of course. I looked at your son's profile. He seems promising. Wants to become an investigator just like his father, I understand."

Yagami nodded, then imagined there was probably no camera on Watari and said, "Yes, indeed. He's planning on joining the force as soon as possible."

"Are social events such as yesterday's common in Light's life?"

Yagami lowered his eyes and his face got slightly red. "I... do not know for certain," he replied, turning his eyes to the picture of his family he had on his desk. "I work a lot, so I do not have direct contact with most of my family's routine. I _think_ they're not particularly common, especially this close to important exams, but they're common enough that it's not surprising. As in… he doesn't go out every weekend, but once a month, perhaps once every five weeks, sounds like as accurate as I can get."

"He accompanied one of his friends - a female - home. He didn't kiss her goodbye." That was all L said, so Yagami explained.

"He hasn't had many girlfriends-"

"But he certainly goes out with a lot of people," L concluded.

"No, not at all," Yagami said, his eyebrows raising and his tone surprised. "He has many... suitors, male and female. He's very popular in that department. But he doesn't seem to enjoy that nor take advantage of it. The only people he's dated were girls whom he really liked. I suppose that makes it even more likely that he's Kira, doesn't it." He sighed, making it sound like a statement and not a question.

"No, actually, that's evidence against him being Kira. Serial killers in general tend to be... sexually deviant," L explained, lacking a better term. "Do you believe, not as a father, but as an investigator, that your son is a likely suspect? Indeed, if it weren't for the karaoke night out, I'd put him immediately in the 'further investigation needed' list."

"I... don't know," he answered with sincerity. "I know my son. He's a good person. He wants to be a police officer because he wants to make the world a better place. And he's also incredibly smart. I wouldn't think, as a father, that he'd be capable of that. Even if he was handed such power. As an investigator, I have to agree that he could fit the vague profile we have." They remained in silence, and Watari waited. Yagami wasn't done speaking. "My professional opinion is biased in this case. I hope you understand. I do not know what to think, because whenever I try to think professionally, I fear overcorrecting. And whenever I try to think emotionally, I certainly fall prey to the image a father has of his son. What you saw... the reactions you saw me having, they were the reactions of a father whose son is a possible suspect in a serial killer investigator. That is all."

"I see. Thank you. I appreciate your honesty," the distorted voice said. "I currently agree with investigator Silva. Your son does not warrant, as of right now, further thought. Given the huge list of potential and likely actual psychopaths we're going through, there's probably little to fear."

The chief let out a breath he hadn't realised he'd been holding. "Thank you, L. That is good for a father to hear."

"For an investigator, too. One less suspect means one less person we need to spend resources with." Watari got up and left without waiting for Yagami, correctly guessing that the chief would like some time alone with his thoughts before heading home.

* * *

_10:37PM. Yagami Household, Tokyo, Japan._

Soichiro walked in and announced his arrival. "We're in the living room!" he heard his wife reply, and he saw the family together watching a movie.

"Hello. How was your day?" asked Light, looking up from his entertainment.

"It was very, very tiring. You'll forgive me if I don't join you? I need a shower and a night of sleep."

"No problem," replied his son, turning back to the TV. Soichiro smiled. Of course his son wasn't Kira. How could he ever have suspected that?

Ryuk watched Soichiro's facial expressions and chuckled his "Kukuku..." as the man climbed up the stairs. Light raised an eyebrow, but obviously didn't comment on the Shinigami's behaviour.

* * *

_11:53PM._

"Okay. What did you find?" Light asked Ryuk.

"Let me remind you that I do not take sides, and I'm not your servant, and…"

"Yes, I know all that," he answered with impatience. "I just want to know what she wrote." So the Shinigami recited to the boy everything investigator Silva had written, and Light's expression got grimmer and more dismayed as he listened, only lighting up a little bit by the end. "Fuck," he spits. "So if it wasn't for my… plan… they'd put me in the list for further investigation. That does not please me. That does not please me at all." Light had been sitting by his desk but now he was pacing, both hands behind his back, a deep frown on his face. "I have bought time, and that's good, but it's not enough. If they've already decided to start checking people directly, I may be running out of time."

Ryuk had stopped paying attention and was eating his prize apples quickly. That had been a good deal he'd made. Light kept pacing and talking to himself.

"They probably won't get back to me too soon, but the fact is that I _am_ Kira and they simply will not find any evidence that anyone else is when they start being thorough. How much time do I have?" The boy looked up to see Ryuk lying on an imaginary hammock eating his apple and sighed in frustration. That good-for-nothing god of death… No, he shouldn't think like that. If it weren't for Ryuk, he'd be in an even worse situation. He needed to salvage what he could somehow.

_You do know what we're going to have to do_, Death said, sounding smug instead of paranoid for a change.

_Out of the question_, Cautious said.

_But… he kinda does have a point_, Practical explained.

_Have we all lost our minds? They're innocent people!_ Cautious sounded outraged.

_They are _lots_ of innocent people, too_, Common Sense supplied. _Not only that but our father is amongst them. Plus, that'd make it pretty obvious that the person who killed them was amongst the small group investigated so far, which would give L tons of evidence to single us out._

_But if L doesn't have a team to back him up anymore, he won't be able to investigate us at all. And if all the people investigating us die, what are the odds that _anyone else_ will want to?_ Death still sounded smug.

_You're-_

_I think the word you're looking for is "right,"_ replied Death.

_This is a false dichotomy_, said Common Sense. _Just because we can't stand idly by and just "not generate evidence" doesn't mean the only alternative is to kill everyone who's after us._

_Yes_, Cautious seized. _Five minutes by the clock generating alternatives._

_First alternative, kill everyone who's after us. Second alternative, kill a sizeable fraction of them_, Death offered.

_This sizeable fraction obviously must _not_ contain the investigator who was after us, _added Common Sense._ Speaking of which…_ "Ryuk, you wouldn't tell me the name of the investigator who was after me, would you?"

"Eh?" Ryuk dropped from his thoughts. "Ah… sorry, Light, it's against the rules. After all, what would be the point of the Eye Trade if we could just tell the humans the names they sought?"

Light nodded at that. "How about physical description? Could you tell me that part?"

Ryuk seemed to concentrate and try to remember something, then shrugged. "Sure. She was very very short even for a human female, brown hair, wore glasses. Eh… that was all I could get. I don't really see many differences between you human faces."

"Sure. Thanks," Light said, and thought some more. _Ryuk isn't much help, but now we know whom not to kill if it comes to that, somewhat._

_We could try to find out who L is and kill them_, Cautious suggested.

_That is very hard to do, but yes, it's a possible plan,_ Practical answered. _What else?_

_Incriminate someone else?_ Common Sense said.

_Then how would we explain that the deaths continued even after they were imprisoned? _asked Practical.

_We could say that the power of death passes on when someone is caught? That would make it look like Kira really is a god of death who's using humans as his tool to cleanse the world or some shit_, he explained.

_Positive points for style and psychological impact, penalty for complexity. What else?_

_Is there any aspect of this problem we're not considering?_ asked Practical.

_We're Kira. We're working under the worst-case scenario that the police knows we're a bright male high school or young college student. They have started looking for specific people, and they're probably brute-forcing. But they also must have lots of influence and processing power. If we don't stop them, they'll eventually get to us_, Death said.

_That is, if they _want_ to get to us_, Cautious mused.

_Oh._

_See, we have quite a legion of fans, don't we?_ Cautious explained. _There are websites dedicated to us, there's even a programme dedicated to us on Sakura TV. The Kingdom of Kira. How could we use that to our advantage?_


	5. Check

_A/N: Review! Reviews make me happy! There are too few reviews, I can't know what and how to improve if you don't review! Yay reviews!_

_A/N 2: Sorry about the ultra delay, I've been busy with a lot of things, mainly school. I'm not going to promise the new chapter will come soon, but I'm not giving up this story so soon. That is, unless I suddenly receive a very large number of sensible reviews that make the very premise of my story feeble and untenable, and in that case I'd better just start it over, but my priors for that are tiny._

* * *

_9:23AM. January 4, 2004. Kira Taskforce Team Gamma Headquarters, Tokyo, Japan._

Investigative teams from all over the world had arrived. However, the headquarters was still the same, and it was much emptier, because the vast majority of the team was in the field actually investigating. They had a mounting list of future investigation targets and L had decided that in two days they'd gather what they had thus far and redistribute their resources.

The past days had been uneventful. Kira kept killing, showing no sign of relenting or any change that was distinguishable from statistical noise. Because of the enlarged group, however, they already had scanned thousands of potential Kiras. About 1.2% of the people investigated figured out they were being followed, 80% of the time because of bad luck on the part of the investigator and the remaining because of sloppiness. In some cases the investigator resigned in fear of having been found by Kira, and in all cases of incompetence where that didn't happen the investigator was moved to another team.

There was a knock on the door. Someone opened it and one of the members of the other teams - Yagami couldn't recall whether he was Team Alpha or Team Beta - walked into their headquarters. He slowed down, taking in the empty space around him, but then continued straight to the chief.

"Mr. Yagami, we have a… situation," said the investigator in English.

"Yes?"

"With the… fansites."

"Fansites?"

"It's how we dubbed all the forms of media that glorify Kira, such as the websites dedicated to him or that show on Sakura TV. They seem to be in chaos."

"How so?" Yagami noticed the investigators in the room weren't paying any attention to this - or most of them weren't, anyway. He was glad about that. Watari _was_ paying very close attention, however. Yagami was also glad about that.

"It seems that, uh… a number of them have been contacted simultaneously by someone claiming to be Kira."

Yagami's eyebrows shot up and even his pitch changed. "What?!"

"What did the messages say?" asked Watari.

"You see, that's the thing. Each message is different. A lot of them are conflicting and our team's specialists have mostly agreed that each message was written by a completely different person based on their structure and handwriting."

"I see," replied Yagami, regaining his calm. "What makes you think that's noteworthy? It could be just someone messing with them."

"As I said," the investigator explained, and started to sweat. His tongue unsuccessfully attempted to help his dry lips, and he threw furtive glances to the sides. "Each message seems to have been sent by a completely different person. It's one thing for someone to mimic someone else's style, maybe even two or three other people. But we currently have 36 different writing styles and counting as our analysts keep examining it. If someone is messing with them, it's a team of someones, and probably a rather large team. We have found in the past hour over 60 messages and there's probably more. Sakura TV has been conspicuously silent about this event so far, which suggests they probably received a message, too, and are waiting for Kira's Kingdom to air so they can expose it."

"That's strange. But still, if it wasn't a person messing with them, it can't have been Kira, can it? Kira is only one person, based on our profile, unless we've been severely fooled."

That made the investigator pause. He clearly hadn't thought of that. Yagami noticed that their exchange had been quite the heated one and that now many of the investigators had stopped to listen. There was an overall hush in the HQ.

"No, no, he's right," L's voice explained from its computer. "We do know Kira is using supernatural means to perform his killings and sending distinct messages simultaneously like that… Kira can also control the behaviour of the victims and time of death. It's possible - indeed, likely - that he has made his victims send these messages. But that would mean that he has a much greater and finer deal of control than we'd been assuming, because unless a bunch of criminals suddenly all die at the same time, that means he can control those people long before their actual expected time of death. There's also the possibility that he can simply control people without killing them, though then we'd be hard pressed to explain how we're all still here."

Yagami digested that information and the investigator from what was probably Team Alpha waited. "Is there anything else?" he finally asked.

"In fact, there is. Even though the messages have been quite different, there is one theme that's common to a number of them."

"What's that?"

"He's, ah…" The investigator swallowed, cleared his throat, and continued. "He's commanding the people to make the investigations stop and to make public the names and faces of everyone they suspect works for the Kira case."

They were silent for a while.

"That could cause trouble," L said, finally. "Please send me, Yagami, and Klein a copy of all messages. That will be all." He went silent.

* * *

_9:50AM._

"Yagami-sama," Watari said after spending a few minutes in silence on his laptop. He had reverted to speaking Japanese for the chief's sake.

"Yes?"

"L says we must stop the message sent to Sakura TV from airing at all costs." L felt this was a doomed endeavour, however. Watari himself could already see how this could fail. "They also believe we should check all other TV networks in case Kira has sent them something or threatened them. They do not believe Kira would actually kill anyone that's not a criminal - his 'morals' are too strong for that - but they believe Kira would make threats and bet on us believing them."

"I agree," replied Yagami under his breath. "But those messages were sent from all over the world. Isn't it likely that Kira has sent them to international broadcast stations, too? And is it possible that he would carry out his threat?"

Watari didn't answer, and Yagami correctly assumed that L was thinking. Finally, he said, "L agrees but says there's not much we can do. They will notify other agencies around the world to attempt to prevent the message from going about, but it will probably be a failure."

It was.

* * *

_10:13AM. Sakura TV building, Tokyo, Japan._

Yagami himself led a small, stealth team to Sakura TV, their main focus. They arrived and Yagami showed the receptionist his badge, with a slightly altered version of his name on it and no picture. They were also wearing helmets concealing their faces ("There's no reason to take any chances," L had reasoned).

"Oh, we were expecting you. Please, take the lift at the end of the corridor to the last floor, it's the first door to the left," she said kindly, and pointed them to the door.

The team went completely silent at that and walked to the indicated lift. No one talked, and even their steps were hushed, as if they were expecting Kira to jump from behind a potted flower and glare them to death or something. Yagami silently instructed two of the members to stay and guard the ground floor. They went up and when they arrived they found the office of the director of Sakura TV, Demegawa Higoshi. They knocked and the heavy-set, short man beamed at them. "Welcome! Can I help you?"

"Yes, ah…" Yagami cleared his throat and licked his lips. This was not what he'd been expecting. "We've been led to believe that you may have received a message…"

"Sent by Kira, yes! And who might you be?" The team thought he was being purposefully obtuse. Their uniforms made it rather clear.

"We're the police. We need to see the message." The two other investigators looked at each other. This was increasingly starting to look like a setup.

"Of course," Demegawa answered joyfully. "Just a second!" He reached into a drawer on his desk and grabbed three videotapes: one labelled 'Demegawa,' one labelled 'Police' and the third labelled 'TV.' "Kira has asked me to show you this one," he pointed to the appropriate one, "before you do anything else with the others. I'd also very much suggest that, as he has threatened to kill every person working for Sakura TV if you do not comply." Demegawa said that quite cheerfully, as if he feared no man or Kira. "If you'll let me," he said, and turned on a small monitor that was mounted behind himself, playing the second tape there.

The team stared in astonishment as the tape started. There was very little they could do. At first it was dark, but then they could see a white backdrop with a black letter K in a gothic font. A distorted voice started speaking. "Hello. If my predictions are correct, it is not yet 11AM. I would go as far as to say it's before 10:30AM." Yagami looked at his watch. 10:24AM. "But that's just me showing off my amazing powers of deduction. Now that we're over with the formalities, I'm fairly certain you lot are here because you'd be oh, oh so sad if the message I want to send to the public was broadcast. But if L is half as smart as I think they are, then you already know this is a futile effort. Let me spell this out for you." There was a very strong note of contempt detectable even through the distortion. "If the other message fails to air, everyone at Sakura TV will die. And that'd just be the start. You got the gist of my other messages, didn't you? I'm certain you did. Your investigation has to end as soon as possible. I would very much love the cooperation of the police in building my new world. Failing that, I would very much love not to have to kill anyone other than the very wicked. You have my psychological profile." Yagami gasped at that. _How on earth…_ "Then you _know_ that I'd very very much rather go by my morals. And they include not killing people without whom the world is worse off." The tone suddenly became much more menacing. "But if you get in my way, then I will be forced to judge that the world _is_ in fact better off without you, and it might just be the case that the innocent people at Sakura TV will have to be my argument to convince you. And if you think you're safe behind this thing covering your faces and with different names on your badges, think again.

"The world is changing, my dears." There was now a note of triumph in that voice. "And it's changing for the better. Do not get in my way. Do not attempt to stop me. Do not continue your investigation. I will know if you do. Oh, and one message to L specifically: I _know_ you will keep investigating me even after this threat. And that's fine. This is just a threat, after all. I just want the world to know that I am the one who's going to call the shots, now. And you? You can keep investigating. You can keep doing whatever it is you're doing - seriously, though, what _are_ you doing? What do you expect, me to start slipping up and giving you evidence? Come _on_, you know better than that. Short of investigating every single person one by one, you're not going to have much success - or you can just hand the world to me and let me finish what I started.

"The message is, then, do whatever you want, I guess." There was a distinct shrug with a very strong note of contempt in that tone. "As long as you don't stop my message from being broadcast. And then… L, I have already won."

Yagami could hear his own stomach churning. The tape ended, and he was fairly certain they wouldn't be able to find much or anything at all from analysing it. It was very likely that Kira had taken care of that, too. Those had been some of the scariest minutes of his life.

"So, gentlemen. Kira has said that you can take all the tapes with you, as long as I have them back by 5 PM which is when Kira's Kingdom airs," explained a merry Demegawa. "I do hope you don't choose an action that will kill me. That would make me very sad." You couldn't tell by the width of his beam.

* * *

_12:36PM. A dark room with a bright monitor somewhere._

L had watched all the videos thrice, and asked Klein to do the same. That speech had clearly been written by Kira verbatim, even if its execution hadn't been his job. Demegawa's video just showed instructions about his own role and the other videos. But there was a catch: it said that if everyone died, Demegawa himself would in fact be spared, and that he was supposed to lie to the police and tell them he'd die, too. And finally, the third video was… worrying.

And more worrying still was the fact that he actually believed Kira. If he had said it any other way, such as mentioning sacrifices or hurting innocent people, then he might have called the bluff. But the way Kira had said it - kill those without whom the world is better or worse off - that was exactly the justification the murderer would look for in order to make peace with himself when taking the life of all those people.

The teams sent to other broadcast stations came back empty-handed. Apparently Kira had only sent his message to Demegawa, or at least that was the case in Tokyo. He seemed to be very confident on his bet, or simply not care. In fact, that was more likely: Kira probably had a plan B, and C, and D, and all he needed to know was whether plan A - having Demegawa broadcast the message - would work.

They had been over all the messages sent by Kira to the various other media stations dedicated to him. Some of them said that he disliked fansites and wanted them gone, others said that he wanted them to start converting more people; some said that they should all stop making such a mess, others said that he encouraged them to make as much noise as possible; some claimed Kira was in fact a lonely woman who would fulfill the desires of any man who could… er… "satisfy" her, but kill all those who failed. It was a big mess and L thought most of it was a sham, just noise to make everything much more confused.

But there was a repeated theme, indeed, claiming that the people who supported Kira should unite against all investigators from all over the world and make the investigations stop.

In other countries, L's contacts had found some versions of the tape sent to Sakura TV, and they all had about the same structure if not exactly the same text: one sent to the station, one to the police, one to the public. The ones to the police all threatened the execution of innocent people in case they stopped the message.

But the situation was slightly worse in the other countries. Kira had apparently guessed, correctly, that L was holding his investigations in Japan, and thus they'd be smarter about it. By consequence, he'd instructed the other directors of TV stations to keep hidden cameras on filming the people who came and trying to get their names and faces. Because of that, some investigators from other countries _did_ get exposed and the majority of them quit immediately in fear once L explained that Kira needed only a face and a name to kill. L kicked himself mentally, wondering why the hell he hadn't told other people about that detail before he sent those innocent officers after Kira's messages.

This was all very… _frustrating_. L felt he was being cheated. It wasn't _fair_ that suddenly Kira became so smart. What changed?

_No, that's not right. I'm panicking, and panicking is hardly ever helpful,_ L thought._ What _exactly_ do I have to fear? What would be the consequences of all of this? What did Kira want and what did he predict will be the result?_

...clearly Kira wanted L in a state of panic. That much was obvious. Maybe Kira even predicted that this panic would subside quickly as L started thinking. How many levels meta should L go? How many levels meta did Kira go? Most of his predictions had been dead on, and that probably meant that… what? Kira was playing with them. Kira was messing with them. Kira was… being arrogant and overconfident. As L had predicted he would.

But that wasn't all. Kira wanted to make sure that the message was passed on, that the people of the world heard it. Why? Because he wanted to make it clear that he was starting to play the game seriously. He wanted… followers. He wanted the people to turn against the investigators. He was… moving.

Why? Why now? L's priors had that it was simply chance, coincidence. Kira hadn't seemed to take the hypothesis of a brute-force search seriously, but then that could have been a bluff. But if Kira did know they were searching him, that would mean either that they had a mole - a hypothesis that couldn't be discarded with a team as large as this one - or that he was amongst the people already investigated and had noticed the investigation. That didn't help much, however, since they had already covered thousands of people. And if it had been because of that, shouldn't Kira have done this later, to make it even harder to pin him down?

L wasn't sure what to think. He wasn't sure anymore of his assessment of Kira's intelligence. How many levels meta was Kira going? How much should he model what Kira had predicted? What should he do?

And so L thought. And he thought and he thought and he thought. Until, at last, he came to a conclusion. It was the best he could do for now, and it was temporary anyway, since he needed to know what the reaction of the investigators would be to hearing the message.

Kira was right, he was winning. But he had started with a huge advantage over them, which L had reduced considerably already. All he had to do was… keep reducing this advantage until Kira was behind bars. He would keep investigating, keep working. As Kira had predicted.

* * *

_5:00PM. Kira Taskforce Team Gamma Headquarters, Tokyo, Japan._

The flashy opening of Kira's Kingdom with all its gold and pink showed up on the screen, and its presenter, Demegawa Hitoshi, started yelling at the audience as he always did. It was a second-class show, but according to their information it was the only thing keeping Sakura TV alive these days. Kira had certainly come as a very welcome surprise to the studio.

"Good evening, Tokyo! Today is a very special day, a very special day. We have a message from our regnant Kira, who has chosen us to deliver this message to the people of Japan." The short man grinned manically, his many golden jewels twinkling in the light. "If you all want to know what this message is, stay tuned after our commercials!"

_Oh, no,_ was the general feeling that went through the HQ as they heard those words. He'd take forever to actually _say_ what message Kira had sent him.

* * *

_5:24PM._

Finally, Demegawa was ready to say what the big message was. Everyone awaited nervously, and when he did say it, a cold chill went through the whole room. Except for Yagami, Klein and L, no one else had seen the message.

"People of Japan," the message started. "This is Kira." There was a slight pause. "Some of you may have been wondering, for the past few weeks, whether I actually exist. Of course I do, how else would you explain the fact that every day a criminal somewhere in the world has been dying per hour? So let me make this clear: I exist, and I wish to make this world a better place. I wish to bring Heaven to Earth. Some of you already believe in this cause, some of you have been helping me. Others have been trying to somehow contact me, and others still have been trying to suggest other possible targets for me. This is futile, and the only thing that will convince me to remove someone from society is judging that society is better off without them.

"Which brings me to the next point. As some of you might've known since the broadcast by someone who called themself 'L' a few weeks ago, there is an ongoing effort to investigate me. Indeed, there is a sizeable number of 'justice' officers around the globe dedicating themselves to this task. I say this is also futile. However, it is distracting, and it is also a deviation of justice's true purpose. They should aid me, not hinder me, and I would ask them kindly to withdraw their power from the investigative force.

"Messages similar to this are being repeated around the globe. I would encourage you to dedicate your abilities to help me build a better world, a world without suffering, a peaceful world, instead of opposing me and spending precious time and resources in what will be a fruitless effort.

"And to those who will remain in this foolish endeavour… well. I can only wish you the best of luck and give you the knowledge that I consider this a hindrance to society." Another pause. "Governments of the world, I would ask you the same help I ask of the justice officers. Back me up and you will see a world of peace, a world of prosperity, a world where goodness thrives." A final pause. "Let us build this world into the world we wish to live in." The transmission ended.

* * *

_January 5, 2004._

"The UN and the Interpol have called emergency meetings with all of their members following the startling revelations made in news networks all over the world yesterday by the criminal calling himself Kira. Governments from all over the world are in disarray, and a number of diplomatic events have been cancelled in order to accommodate-"

"Following yesterday's shocking news, many tyrannical world leaders are mysteriously dying of heart attacks, leaving their respective countries headless. Religious leaders and international terrorists are also in the growing list of political figures that have been dying one per hour since the first announcement in Japan of Kira's message. Some of them go to great lengths to show their face in public before immediately collapsing…"

"Our LORD Kira has spoken to us! He has made His wishes clear: full cooperation and a world united against those that only selfishly care about themselves and destroy society in their greed!"

"Kira is _not_ doing the work of God. Kira is _not_ God. I do not know _what_ Kira is, but judgment can only be passed by God, through God, and no one else has the right to decide who lives or dies. Brothers, sisters, let us pray."

"Kira was sent by Heaven to punish Sinners! Watch as the wrath of the Almighty sweeps the land and cleanses the world of the impure! This is the time of reckoning!"

"Following last night's incredible messages, the international community seems to be polarising, with loud groups for and against Kira. Some believe-"

"Kira is a monster, don't you see?! Sure, he says he wants to make the world a 'better place' and wants cooperation, but he just wants to rule over all of us. And what, now the governments are going to just acquiesce quietly, meekly, like lambs?"

"Well, like, Kira can't be so bad, right? I mean, all the people _he_ kills, they're people who really _were_ bad. Like, all those war criminals who, like, they killed a lot of people! And they ordered a lot of people to die, too! And there's those terrorists, like that one, what's his name, with the beard…"

"The logic is obviously flawed. How can Kira claim the moral high ground, saying he only kills evil people, and not be doomed by himself in the process?"

"We're headed for doom. This is going to be our destiny, under the hands of a demonic dictator, a supernatural fist. This is even worse than the Big Brother, because we can't even know whether we're being watched."

"This is the dawn of an age of peace. An age where man will be able to live without fear, without having to always look behind himself at night. This is what the world should be."

"Well, but… what about _after_ all these heinous criminals are gone? What then? Do you think Kira will just… disappear? Just stop? He won't, and you're naïve if you think he will. It's too much power for only one person. Too much power."

* * *

_5:32PM. Yagami household, Tokyo, Japan._

Yagami Light watched TV with a hard, somewhat triumphant smirk. "Check," he said quietly in a sickly sweet tone. "Your move, L-kun." The shinigami floating behind him chuckled.

* * *

_5:34PM. Somewhere in Japan._

She watched the news with growing curiosity. The only thing that ran explicitly through her mind was, _I wonder…_


End file.
